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C^B. 

THE BOYS’ OWN BOOK 
OF ADVENTURERS 













THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 


MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OP CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 






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Then Stanley struck the CtOnc 









THE BOYS’ OWN BOOK 
OF ADVENTURERS 


BY 

ALBERT BRITT 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1923 


All rights reserved 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Copyright, 1923, 

By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 


Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1923. 


THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY 
NEW YORK 

SEP 19 1923 

©C1A759011 



CONTENTS 


Page 

J. Stanley, the Maker of Africa. 1 

II. Chinese Gordon, Soldier and Martyr. 30 

III. Burnham, the Last of the Scouts.52 

IV. McGiffin of the Yalu. 78 

V. Burton, the Pilgrim Adventurer.92 

VI. Johnny Poe, Athlete, Cowboy, Miner and 

Soldier.109 

VII. Scott of the Antarctic. 117 

VIII. Rajah Brooke of Sarawak. 138 

IX. Walker, the Filibuster.166 











THE BOYS’ OWN BOOK 
OF ADVENTURERS 


I 


STANLEY, THE MAKER OF AFRICA 

When Henry M. Stanley was born in Wales in 
1840,* Africa was the Dark Continent. For centuries 
white men had skirted its coasts and nibbled at its 
borders. Egypt was the seat of one of the oldest civi¬ 
lizations known to man. In the north the Cartha¬ 
ginians had built and lost a great empire before the 
Christian Era began. The Boers had found a refuge 
in the south early in the century and Capetown had 
been a port of call almost from the time the Portu¬ 
guese sailors, inspired by Henry the Navigator, began 
the exploring of the unknown seas. But the heart of 
the great continent remained almost untouched and 
unknown. 

There had not been wanting explorers, missionaries, 
soldiers of fortune, to make the attempt. The roll is 
a long one. About the time Stanley was born a Scotch 
hunter, Gordon-Cummings, was pushing up from the 
south in his pursuit of big game. On the Limpopo 
River he crossed the trail of a young Scotch missionary, 
David Livingstone, who was destined later to have his 
name linked forever with Stanley’s. Speke, Grant, Sir 
Samuel Baker were preparing to make their treks into 

* In his Autobiography he intimates that the year of his birth 
was 1842. 


1 



2 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

the jungle for sport, for exploration, for adventure, 
any or all of the various quests that have drawn rest¬ 
less feet and ardent spirits into the dark and unknown 
places of earth. 

There were many hands prying at the door, but it 
was not until the Welsh-American wanderer, soldier, 
sailor, newspaper correspondent, explorer Stanley 
came that the way was opened across the darkest of 
the Dark Continent and lines and names began to 
appear on what had been the largest blank space on 
the world’s map. 

It would be hard to imagine a more unfavorable 
beginning for a great work than the one young Stanley 
had. Even the name which he was later to bear was 
not his own. His father was the oldest son of John 
Rowlands, of Llys, and his mother was Elizabeth, 
daughter of Moses Parry, of Denbigh Castle, Wales. 
In his autobiography he makes only the barest refer¬ 
ence to his father and seems never to have seen him. 
His mother he saw once when he was twelve years old. 
The lad was then an inmate of St. Asaph’s workhouse. 

His first recollection is of his mother’s father, Moses 
Parry, then a very old man. The early years of the 
lad’s life were hard, bitter years. His grandfather 
died and he was sent to live with Richard and Jenny 
Price. Stanley says that this old couple was “dismayed 
at my increasing appetite.” At any rate, the age of 
seven found him in St. Asaph’s Workhouse, under the 
rule of James Francis, a one-handed schoolmaster, 
“brutal of temper and callous of heart,” who after¬ 
wards died insane. 


The Maker of Africa 3 

The story of those days reads like a chapter out of 
Nicholas Nickleby’s experience at Dotheboys Hall. It 
is a record of hardship and hard work, poor fare and 
little play. But the schoolmaster-superintendent seems 
to have had some talent for teaching along with his 
slave-driving propensities, and young Rowlands be¬ 
came fairly proficient in mathematics. He also acquired 
a taste for books, although his chances for reading 
were few and the books still fewer. 

He was about fifteen when he came to the end of 
his road in the workhouse. Here, as in Dotheboys 
Hall, it was rebellion that opened the door. Resenting 
an unjustified flogging, young Rowlands floored the 
schoolmaster with a lucky kick, beat him to insensi¬ 
bility with his own blackthorn and with another boy 
scaled the wall and ran away. At first his wandering 
feet led him to his grandfather, John Rowlands, of 
Llys. The grim, prosperous old farmer heard his tale 
of distress and made curt answer: 

“Very well. You can go back the way you came. 
I can do nothing for you and have nothing to give you.’^ 

There followed a short term as pupil-teacher for a 
cousin, Moses Owen, who gave him little but a deeper 
passion for books, and a still briefer period as odd-job 
laborer for an aunt at Ffnnon Benno. Another aunt 
enticed him to Liverpool with the promise of a job in 
an insurance office. There was no job, and the best 
he could do was to find temporary work with a butcher. 

But Liverpool gave him his first sight of salt water 
and his wanderings along the wharves brought him to 
a sea captain who offered him a post as cabin boy at 


4 Boys* Own Book of ’Adventurers 

five dollars a month and an outfit. Once at sea he 
found that he was ship-boy and not cabin-boy—a hard 
post on a harder ship. The mates were what the 
language of the sea termed buckos, which means that 
their relations with the men were summed up in the 
phrase—a word, a curse, and a belaying pin. 

Fifty-two days after she cleared from Liverpool the 
Windermere anchored off the mouth of the Mississippi. 
That was enough for a first try for young Rowlands, 
and he found a shore job with a shipping firm in New 
Orleans. At the same time he found a new name. 
The stranger who helped him to his new post was 
Henry M. Stanley, a shipping broker along the Missis¬ 
sippi. This seemed the beginning of better days for 
the young immigrant. For the first time in his life 
he had money for books. Here is the list of his first 
purchases: Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman 
Empire, Spencer’s Faery Queene, Tasso’s Jerusalem 
Delivered, Pope’s Iliad, Dryden’s Odyssey, Paradise 
Lost, Plutarch’s Lives, Simplicius on Epictetus, and a 
History of the United States. A resounding list of 
great names this for the leisure hours of a penniless 
lad just out of the ’tween-decks quarters of a hard- 
driven square rigger. 

These were the days when the South was moving 
blindly toward the abyss of Civil War. Young Stanley 
worked for a few months in New Orleans and made 
a trip to St. Louis to meet his foster father. In some 
way he missed him and made the return trip on a 
flatboat. 

His period of comfort under the protection of Mr. 


5 


The Maker of Africa 

Stanley was of short duration. Late in 1860 the latter 
started on a trip to Cuba from which he did not return, 
and the young Henry M. drifted up into Arkansas and 
found a place in a country store not far from Little 
Rock. Here the war found him. Knowing little of 
the merits of the controversy, and caring less, local 
public opinion drove him into the Dixie Grays. The 
officer who swore him into the service of the Confed¬ 
erate States of America was Adjutant General Burge- 
vine. This man was just setting his feet on a trail that 
was to lead him far. After the collapse of secession 
Burgevine drifted out to China and became Com¬ 
mander of the Chinese Imperial Army against the Tai 
Ping rebels. His successor in this post was Chinese 
Gordon, with whom Stanley was to have contact later 
in the founding of the Congo Free State. However 
far the trails of the adventurers lead, they cross and 
intertwine at the lone crossroads. 

Young Stanley’s military experience was short, but 
extremely varied. He was captured at the battle of 
Shiloh and sent to Camp Douglas, near Chicago. 
Prison life was too severe, and he found himself wast¬ 
ing away when an offer of service in the Northern ranks 
showed him the way out. North and South were little 
more than points of the compass to him, and in 1863 
he was a Union artilleryman. 

We must read fast to follow the record of his wan¬ 
dering feet in those days. Discharged from the Union 
army on account of sickness, he went to sea again. 
There was a brief visit to his Welsh birthplace where 
his family rejected him. He was wrecked off the 


6 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

Spanish Coast. Here is the entry in his diary: 
“Wrecked off Barcelona. Crew lost in the night. 
Stripped naked and swam to shore. Barrack of Car¬ 
bineers-demanded my papers.” This lad of 

twenty-three was too busy doing things to write about 
them. The writing days were just ahead. Back in 
the United States he enlisted in the navy and took part 
in the attack on Fort Fisher. Here he earned promo¬ 
tion for swimming 500 yards under fire and attaching 
a rope to a captured steamer. His newspaper reports 
of the attack were his first venture in the journalistic 
field. It was the final shaping of his course. Hence¬ 
forth he was to be primarily and always a correspond¬ 
ent. But his work was not to deal with the ordinary 
material of the newspaper reporter. From the begin¬ 
ning his feet led him to strange lands. His first expe¬ 
dition was to Smyrna in 1866. Here he walked the 
edge of disaster and he and his companions were nearly 
killed by natives. 

There followed a brief tour of our own West, where 
he had the opportunity of watching the dealings of 
Generals Hancock and Sherman with the Indians, and 
learned lessons that were to be useful in later days in 
Africa. Now came his first taste of Africa. Napier 
was leading an English force in the attack on Emperor 
Theodore of Abyssinia and Stanley’s letters to the New 
York Herald were the first news the civilized world 
had of the campaign. In fact these reports were for 
a long time the only information England had of the 
fall of Theodore, the breaking of the cable to Malta 
having cut off the official dispatches. This work put 



The Maker of Africa 7 

him definitely in the front rank of the great corre¬ 
spondents. 

The months that followed were busy ones, even for 
such a prodigious worker as Stanley. He described the 
work on the Suez Canal now nearly completed, covered 
an insurrection in Crete, a royal baptism in Athens, 
and wrote letters from Rhodes, Smyrna, Beyrout, and 
Alexandria. Then he jumped back to Spain for a close 
view of an impending revolution. 

The revolution hung fire and the Herald sent him 
to Aden to meet Dr. Livingstone, who was reported 
to be on his way out of the dark interior of Africa. 
Aden may not be quite the hottest, dirtiest town in the 
world, but it is a close contender for that doubtful 
honor. It squats on the shore of the Red Sea at the 
lowermost point of Arabia where the narrow waters 
open out into the Indian Ocean. Behind it lie barren 
wastes of sun-smitten sand and before it the turgid 
waters of the Gulf of Aden. With the opening of the 
Suez Canal it became one of the crossroad corners of 
the world’s traffic, and here gathered the homeless 
drifters and wasters of all nations. 

Here Stanley waited vainly for ten weeks for Liv¬ 
ingstone. Here, too, he wrote his book on the Mag- 
dala Campaign with Napier and filled in his leisure 
hours with Josephus, Herodotus, the Iliad, and Wil¬ 
kinson and Lane on Egypt. 

Early in 1869 he was back in Spain and saw the 
establishment of the new government that followed 
the deposing of Isabella. It was a hectic interlude. He 
was present at a Carlist uprising at Saragossa and ran 


8 


Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

a gauntlet of bullets to make his way into Valencia, 
where unhappy Spain was being treated to another 
insurrection. 

The trails were narrowing now. In October of that 
year a dispatch from James Gordon Bennett, of the 
New York Herald, called him to Paris. The meeting 
was characteristic of both men. As the story goes, 
Bennett came to Stanley’s bedside in his Paris hotel 
in the small hours of the morning and waked him from 
sound sleep. “I want you to go to Africa to find Liv- 
ingtone,” was his greeting. “When do I start?” was 
Stanley’s reply. “At once,” said Bennett. Despite the 
apparently urgent character of the commission, the 
road to Africa was a long and devious one. On his 
way to Central Africa he was to report the ceremonies 
at the opening of the Suez Canal, and cover Baker’s 
expedition in upper Egypt, and the excavations in Jeru¬ 
salem. Then he was to visit Syria and Constantinople 
and discuss the political situation in these places, stop 
in the Crimea to describe the archeological explora¬ 
tions there, explain the Russian policy and progress in 
the Caucasus and Trans-Caspian region generally, and 
double back through Persia into India. Those things 
accomplished, he was to set out through the African 
jungle to find Livingstone. 

It was a five years’ task for the ordinary experienced 
correspondent and Stanley did it in twelve months. 

The task of finding Livingstone in itself was enough 
for most men to have rested a life reputation on. It 
was four years since the old Scotch missionary had 
plunged into Africa on his last trip, and many, includ- 


9 


The Maker of Africa 

ing Stanley, believed that he was long since dead. If 
alive he was supposed to be somewhere in the neigh¬ 
borhood of Lake Tanganyika, but since even the loca¬ 
tion of the lake itself was only vaguely known in a 
district at least six or seven hundred miles each way, 
the task of finding him alive or securing positive evi¬ 
dence of his death, if dead, can be imagined. It was 
necessary to outfit for the better part of a year and for 
travel through a country much of it hostile and all of 
it frequently convulsed with tribal wars. There were 
wide stretches of desert to be crossed, swamps to be 
waded, mountain ranges to be surmounted, and always 
there was the jungle with its menace of fever, wild 
beasts, and the lurking savage with the poisoned dart. 

Early in 1871 the expedition was ready to start from 
Zanzibar, the chief port of what was afterward Ger¬ 
man and is now British East Africa, three white men, 
thirty-one armed freemen of Zanzibar, 153 porters, 27 
pack animals, and two riding horses. It was a hard 
trail, and before they were long on the way they be¬ 
came involved in a campaign with the Arabs against 
Mirambo, an Unyamwezi chief. The result was disas¬ 
trous to Stanley. He was defeated and was compelled 
to reorganize his force. This diversion cost him three 
months’ time and many men. 

Resuming his penetration of the interior, rumors 
began to reach him through the natives of a white man 
with a long white beard and hair who was living at 
Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika. Slowly he pressed forward, 
buying the favor of native chiefs where it could be done 
without too great cost, aweing them with a show of 


10 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

force where the price demanded was too high. He was 
now in a land where firearms were unknown, and his 
strongest argument was an exhibition of the black stick 
that vomited thunder and lightning, dealing death to 
whatever stood in its way. 

His meeting with Livingstone, at LFjiji, is historical. 
For two hundred and thirty-five days he had struggled 
toward this moment, walking every day with Death at 
his elbow. Here was the climax of one of the great 
exploratory efforts half across the unknown Continent, 
over trails never before pressed by white feet, and his 
greeting to the long-sought missionary was the formal 
salutation of one polite stranger to another in the midst 
of civilization. 

“Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” he said. “My name 
is Stanley.” When he returned without Livingstone, 
for the old man accompanied him only as far as Unyan- 
yembe, there was much discussion and some question as 
to his having really found the lost missionary. By the 
time the Royal Geographical Society and the press had 
decided to accept his report he was so incensed that he 
was already on the point of quitting England for an¬ 
other trip to Africa. This time he joined Sir Garnet 
Wolseley in his campaign against King Coffee of the 
Ashantees. It was his first view of the West Coast, 
and this experience, which was the usual one of the 
small military expeditions, half-punitive and half-devel¬ 
opmental, seems to have fixed more firmly in his mind 
the half-formed plan of his next and greatest journey. 

At any rate, in 1874 he is back in London urging 
Lawson, the proprietor of the London Chronicle, to 


The Maker of Africa 11 

join with Bennett of the New York Herald to send him 
to Africa to finish the work that Livingstone had begun. 
It was on his way home from the Ashantee campaign 
that he had heard of the death of Livingstone, and 
henceforth the belief grew steadily stronger in his mind 
that he was destined to carry on the work of the mis¬ 
sionary. In his Autobiography now begin to occur 
expressions indicating a fervor somewhat beyond the 
usual zeal of the explorer. 

But his main aims were still geographical, and there 
were four principal objectives to be attained: 

1. To determine the direction and ultimate mouth 
of the great river that he and Livingstone had named 
the Lualaba. 

2. To find the true outlet of Lake Tanganyika, on 
whose shore he had found Livingstone. 

3. To map Lake Victoria and determine whether it 
is one large lake or a cluster of smaller ones. 

4. To determine the exact extent and location of 
Lake Albert. 

These were all tasks on which Livingstone had set 
his heart, and it was their completion that Stanley now 
conceived as his high destiny. 

On November 11, 1874, he left Zanzibar for the 
second time to blaze his way westward across the con¬ 
tinent, this time to stand finally on the shore of the 
Western Ocean. The trail that led him to the interior 
was a “footwide path” across plains, over hills, and 
through jungles. Near the coast game abounded, much 
of it dangerous, but harder days were to come. 

There were 356 natives in the party, and three 


12 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

whites besides Stanley, Francis and Edward Pocock 
and Frederick Barker. Beyond Ugogo they came to 
a sterile country covered with low bushes. Here there 
was no game for food and little water. For nine days 
they struggled through it. Five men died of starva¬ 
tion and four others succumbed soon after. At Ituru 
Edward Pocock broke under the strain of hardship and 
died. Nowhere is there any hint that Stanley’s body 
or will weakened to the point of even considering the 
possibility of returning or turning aside. His course 
was westward, and he held it steadily. Poor Pocock’s 
deathbed was by a lake which Stanley was later to 
establish as the southernmost waters of the Nile. 

Hostile natives now added to his troubles. At Um- 
yata one of his bearers was cut to bits and scattered 
along the trail. The natives wanted war and, although 
Stanley had by this time lost twenty men by death and 
eighty-nine by desertion, and had thirty more on the 
sick list, he gave them what they wanted. He lost 
twenty-two in the fighting that followed, but there were 
no more hostilities in that particular district. 

Lake Victoria lies about 720 miles from the coast. 
Passengers on the railroad now do the distance in less 
than thirty-six hours. Stanley had taken 104 days, and 
it had cost the lives of over fifty men, including one 
white man. 

This lake was his first main objective. He had set 
himself to determine the exact character of it. To 
this end his black bearers had carried a boat all the 
long jungle miles from Zanzibar. The sections were a 


13 


The Maker of Africa 

load for thirty men, and when it was put together it 
was forty feet in length with a six-foot beam. 

Stanley called for volunteer seamen but none offered. 
Many and quaint were the reasons. One man was help¬ 
less from sea-sickness at the mere sight of such great 
water. Of another it had been prophesied that he 
would die of drowning, and could he be expected to run 
such great risk? 

Then Stanley applied the draft and so made up his 
crew of eleven with which he set sail on March 8th. 
Many and dire were the native prophecies. They told 
of tribes on shore that wore long tails, of tribes that 
trained big dogs for use in war, of tribes that preferred 
human flesh to that of cattle. 

Nature conspired with the natives. Hippos and 
crocodiles appeared in such numbers as threatened to 
upset the boat. Gales swept down on them accom¬ 
panied by torrents of rain and hail that almost 
swamped them. 

Of course there were hostile natives, but most of 
these ran when the white man’s boat spread its wings 
to the wind. The magic of the sail was unknown to 
them. When that did not suffice, a shot or two from 
the explorer’s pistol was enough to send them scurrying. 
Only once at this time does he record the necessity 
of standing off an attack by force. 

Even since coming into the country he had heard 
tales of Mtesa, the Emperor of Uganda. Now he 
had proof of the existence of that royal personage in 
the shape of a flotilla of canoes that came to welcome 
him and lead him to the imperial capital of Rubaga. 


14 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

He was showered with presents of food, oxen, goats, 
sheep, fruit, vegetables, eggs, etc., and finally led to 
the Emperor himself, ruler of 3,000,000 men. Stanley 
found him interested and intelligent, and in his diary 
appears this entry: “Talked about many things, prin¬ 
cipally about Europe and Heaven.” 

On this expedition he was away from his main camp 
at Kagebyi fifty-seven days, and on his return he found 
that Frederick Barker had died of fever and the priva¬ 
tions of the earlier stages of the march. 

Another savage monarch, the King of Ukerewe, fur¬ 
nished him with canoes to cross the lake. When he got 
back to Mtesa’s country he found that restless ruler 
deeply engrossed in a war that kept Stanley waiting 
for several months. During his enforced vacation he 
occupied himself with a translation of parts of the 
Bible into the language of Mtesa’s people. This bore 
fruit after the war was over. At Stanley’s suggestion 
Mtesa asked his chiefs for a vote between the white 
man’s and the Arab’s religion. The Arabs they knew 
as pitiless slave raiders and the white man’s faults 
were yet to appear. Stanley was their friend and the 
friend of their royal master. So it was small wonder 
that the white man’s faith had an overwhelming vote. 
It was out of this beginning that there grew the great 
Uganda Mission, the first and greatest in the interior 
of Equatorial Africa. 

That matter having been settled, Mtesa gave Stanley 
a small escort of 2,300 men. With these he finished 
his work on Lake Victoria and Tanganyika. When he 
was through he had added Mt. Gordon Bennett to 


15 


The Maker of Africa 

the world’s list of high mountains, and settled the argu¬ 
ment over the two lakes. Victoria he had proved to 
be a single lake 21,500 square miles in extent. As to 
the outlet of Tanganyika, he concluded that there was 
none except in times of high water when it flowed 
through the Lukuga into the Lualaba. His next 
problem was the Lualaba. 

This was the great question that he and Livingstone 
had asked in the days of their meeting at Ujiji. They 
had discussed it many times as Livingstone trekked 
eastward with him on the way to Unyanyembe. Stan¬ 
ley had asked it again through the Ashantee campaign 
with Wolseley. Was it part of the Nile system or did 
it turn west and break through to the Atlantic, a path 
that no white man had yet followed? Livingstone had 
dreamed of the day when he should learn the secret 
of the river. Now Livingstone was dead, and the 
river sounded its challenge the more insistently in 
Stanley’s ears. 

It was a wild as well as an unknown country. First 
he must travel the 220 miles from Tanganyika to the 
Lualaba. At the point where he struck the river it 
was a stream of about 1,400 yards in width. He 
was now in the country of Tippu-Tib, an Arab chief¬ 
tain of great power and uncertain reputation. Follow¬ 
ing down the river he came soon to Tippu-Tib’s vil¬ 
lage of Mwan-Mamba. Here he heard weird tales 
of what lay below. There were rapids and falls that 
no man might pass and live. There were great ser¬ 
pents, giant gorillas, leopards, and tribes more savage 
than any animals. 


16 


Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

Abed, the son of Friday, was recommended as an 
authority on the river. “Tell us what you know of 
this river,” said Stanley. 

“Yes, I know all about the river, praise be to God,” 
quoth Abed. “I tell you it flows north and north and 
north, and there is no end to it.” 

There were two ways out. Either he might take 
up the challenge of the river and run the gauntlet of 
its dangers, real and imaginary, or he could turn 
south to Katango and down the Zambezi, a route 
easily followed that would bring them soon to country 
already familiar to white men. 

One way was reasonable safety and a known road. 
The other was dark and beset with perils at every turn 
of the trail. Already enough had been written across 
the map of Africa to insure his fame for the future. 

Stanley and his surviving white companion, Francis 
Pocock, sought to find decision through chance. They 
tossed a coin, heads north, tails south. Six times in 
succession it fell tails. Stanley turned to listen to the 
river and pointed north. That way they went. 

It was November 5, 1876, when they started with 
an escort hired from Tippu-Tib that brought their 
total force to 700 men. Their starting point was 
almost the exact center of Africa east and west, 920 
miles to the Indian Ocean, 1,097 miles to the Atlantic. 

At a village called Nyangwe they left the river and 
traveled for seventeen days through forest before they 
came to the river again. There were signs that some 
of the dire prophesies had sound foundation. One 


The Maker of Africa 17 

village that they passed through was decorated with 
186 human skulls. 

When they took to the river their case was even 
harder. There was room for only thirty-six in the 
boat. The rest followed along shore. So they drifted 
and plodded through the Wenza country. Hostiles 
were everywhere, and as they advanced the beat of 
native drums sounded warning of their coming through 
the jungle ahead of them, “the wildest, weirdest note 
I ever heard,” said Stanley. 

At the junction of the Ruiki and the Lualaba the 
boat halted to wait for the land party. Smallpox now 
attacked the caravan. 

“What a terrible land! Both banks shrouded in 
tall primeval forests were filled with invisible savage 
enemies, out of every bush glared eyes flaming with 
hate, in the stream lurked the crocodiles to feed upon 
the unfortunates, the air seemed impregnated with the 
seeds of death.” 

The wait at the Ruiki was signalized by a three-day 
fight with the natives which was going not too well 
when Tippu-Tib appeared with his men and cleared 
the forest and the river of the hostiles and left Stanley 
and his people free to go on their way down river. 
But the fighting was not ended. It began again once 
Stanley left the Arab’s zone of influence, and each bend 
of the river held fresh possibilities of trouble. It was 
a case of fighting every step of the way at a time when 
every day counted. 

So far their course had been north, only sixty miles 
of westing in a journey of four hundred. 


18 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

The seven cataracts that now bear the name of 
Stanley Falls consumed twenty-two precious days. 
They worked like Titans, these whites and blacks, por¬ 
taging where they must, running the rapids where they 
dared. Many lives were lost. Francis Pocock, the 
last of three white men who had marched out with 
Stanley from Zanzibar, died at Massassa Falls. 

Still the great question of the river’s ultimate direc¬ 
tion was unanswered. Below the falls it turned north¬ 
west. Was it to be the Congo? Or the Niger? 

Another river the size of the Lualaba joined them, 
and they found themselves on a stream four miles wide. 
There were numerous islands now in midstream to 
give them frequent shelter, but first they must run the 
gauntlet of a fleet of war canoes that put out from 
shore. They drove it to flight and landed to wreck a 
village as a salutary warning. 

Hope revived now as they found the river curving 
westward, then southwestward— “Straight for the 
mouth of the Congo,” noted Stanley in his diary. At 
the broad reaches of Stanley Pool they marked more 
than a thousand miles since they began their journey 
down the Lualaba. But the end was near. There 
were more rapids and more lives were lost, but it was 
easy going compared with what had confronted them 
above. Now Stanley knew that it was the Congo, the 
fourth greatest river on the globe, that was hurrying 
them to the sea. The end came August 9, 1877, at 
Boma, at the Congo’s mouth. It was the end, too, of 
7,000 miles of travel since November 11 of the year 
before, 5,000 of them by water. 


The Maker of Africa 19 

Stanley had written his name indelibly in history as 
the first white man to cross the Dark Continent. He 
had answered all four of the questions that he and Liv¬ 
ingstone had asked unceasingly in the long weeks of 
their association. He had traveled the course of a 
great river that drained an area of 2,250,000 square 
miles, a territory equal in size to about five-eighths of 
the total area of the United States. 

Still there was no stopping place for the restless 
Stanley. He had crossed a savage continent through 
perils such as few men of his time had faced. He had 
finished the tasks to which he had set his hand. And 
now we find the work that he had done only a 
beginning. 

His first thought was of England. The land of his 
birth had not treated him well, but his hope was to 
plant the English flag in the land that he had opened. 
A year and a half he spent in London to no purpose. 
Perhaps Stanley was too impatient for the slow proc¬ 
esses of English colonization. Perhaps his American 
background and connections harmed him with the poli¬ 
ticians at Whitehall. Probably the abrupt reversal 
that he proposed of the usual English process of trade, 
the settler, and then the flag was too great a shock for 
the political mind to stand. 

At any rate, Stanley was compelled to cross the 
channel to Belgium, where he found a willing listener 
in King Leopold, at that time one of the wealthiest 
monarchs in Europe. The Comite d’Etude du Haut 
Congo (literally, the Committee for the Study of the 
Upper Congo) was formed, and Stanley went back 


20 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

to his African battlefield. This time he was empow¬ 
ered to build roads and open stations for trading with 
the natives. His first laborers were brought around 
from his old recruiting ground at Zanzibar. Three 
stations were established in that first year and twenty- 
eight lives—six of them white—were the price of the 
year’s work. Stanley himself, weakened by his years 
in the country, bearing a double load of responsibility, 
and doing the work of three or four men, nearly died 
of fever at Manyanga. 

In spite of fever he stayed in the field until he had 
built Leopoldville, which he designed to be a model 
village and the capital of the district. This was in the 
heart of a territory where only five years before he had 
been the first white man to break through the barriers 
of savagery and had literally fought his way down 
river through hostile tribes. Now these same tribes¬ 
men were working under his direction as bearers and 
builders or bringing in their ivory for trade goods 
that Stanley’s men brought fast on his trail. 

But fast as he built, deterioration was no less rapid 
when his eyes were turned away. Returning from a 
six weeks’ absence in Europe to recuperate from his 
fever, he found much of his work undone and many of 
the stations in chaos. Some of his young men were 
too lax and soon succumbed to the slothful invitation 
of the tropics. Others were impatient of delay and 
made the more fatal mistake of trying to hurry natives 
who had never been hurried except by the lash of the 
slave driver. 

One man was seized with the brilliant idea of turn- 


The Maker of Africa 21 

ing the natives into soldiers, so every day he summoned 
them for drill instead of for paid labor or trade. Stan¬ 
ley found him plunged in bitter wonder over the 
growing desertion of his district. 

New men were brought in to take the places of the 
hopeless incapables, others were shown their errors 
and given another chance or shifted to new posts where 
they could make a fresh start. Those who wished had 
the chance of a century to learn their new tasks under 
a past-master in the art of handling natives. 

In the course of extending his line of stations to 
Stanley Falls, Stanley made treaties for territory and 
sovereignty with more than four hundred native chiefs. 
Here is the toll of miles from the sea to the farther¬ 
most station—first, 110 miles of steaming, then 235 
miles of land march, finally 1,070 miles of river navi¬ 
gation till the last whistle blew at Stanley Falls. 

The first steamboats that awakened the echoes along 
the great jungle river were a constant source of won¬ 
der and fear to the blacks. Lured by curiosity and 
then by the chance of trade they soon forgot their fear. 
The articles they welcomed most were cotton cloth, 
brass rods (out of which they made armlets and ank¬ 
lets), and trinkets of various kinds. Much of the 
cloth was of American manufacture, and the common 
name throughout Central Africa for white cotton cloth 
is Mericani. 

Frequently in dealing with the blacks it was neces¬ 
sary to match guile wdth guile, and craft with craft. 
There was a chief at Stanley Pool, one Ngalyum. He 
had received some $4,500 worth of trade goods and 


22 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

presents for the privilege of establishing a station at 
the Pool. After two years he elected to forget the 
transaction and demanded further payment. To make 
matters worse, Ngalyum was an interloping slave 
trader of a particularly offensive sort. He sent word 
of his coming to Stanley with the further information 
that he meant to collect, or put the white man out of 
the country. Stanley hung a big Chinese gong near 
his tent, and ordered his men to keep out of sight, but 
near at hand. 

The truculent Ngalyum came stalking at the head 
of his warriors. 

“Be warned, Rock-Breaker I Go back before it is 
too late. Go back, I say, the way you came.” 

The gong caught his eye and he demanded its pur¬ 
pose. Stanley replied briefly that it was a war fetish. 
“The slightest sound of that would fill this empty camp 
with hundreds of angry warriors; they would drop 
from above; they would spring up from the ground, 
from the forest about, from everywhere.” 

Ngalyum was skeptical, and Stanley beat a tattoo 
on the gong. Immediately his men leaped out, down 
from the trees, out from wagons, from behind bales of 
cloth, out of the deep grass. Ngalyum’s warriors fled 
in panic while that doughty chieftain and his son clung 
to Stanley’s coattails and begged for protection. 

A great obstacle to Stanley’s progress was the slave 
trade in which the Arabs were the leaders. It had been 
estimated that at the time of his first trip through the 
Congo country at least a million lives a year were lost 
in inter-tribal wars and slave-raiding. This estimate 


The Maker of Africa 23 

is probably over the fact, but it was undoubtedly enor¬ 
mous. The natives, crafty and shrewd in their own 
way, were slow to learn the ways of the white man, 
especially when their teacher was brusque and dicta¬ 
torial. The first man in charge at Stanley Falls paid 
with his life for his failure to understand the native 
mind and the necessity for cautious diplomacy. Stu¬ 
pidity cursed each step of the work. One black in 
Stanley’s bodyguard never could learn which to put 
first into his musket, the powder or the ball. Another 
had been instructed to seize the grass along the bank 
while drifting down a swift stream in a canoe. At the 
command “Hold hard, Kirango,” he sprang out of the 
canoe and seized the grass with both hands, letting the 
canoe go its way. Still another had evidently failed 
to read a well-known parody on Yankee Doodle. At 
any rate, ordered to cut a branch off a tree, he clam¬ 
bered out and carefully “sawed between the tree and 
him.” 

Through all this tangle of confusion, of ignorance 
and stupidity and wrong-headedness, Stanley held his 
course, depressed and discouraged often, but never 
quite to the point of despair. The vision he had seen 
as he and Livingstone talked for long hours of what 
Africa might one day be always came back to light him 
on his way. The natives called him Bula-Matari— 
Breaker of Rocks—with good reason. 

By 1884, seven years after he had first blazed his 
way down the Congo, he was able to declare the work 
of founding the Congo Free State practically finished. 
His Governor of the Lower Congo was to have been 


24 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

Gordon, soldier in the Crimea, head of the Chinese 
Imperial Army, British Colonial administrator. The 
cards fell differently, however, and Gordon went to 
Khartoum in Upper Egypt, where he was soon to die 
defending the city against thousands of Sudanese. 

The first recognition of the Congo Free State came 
from Stanley’s adopted country, the United States of 
America, in April, 1884. Hard upon the heels of this 
gratifying announcement came a conference at Berlin 
in which most of the European Governments accepted 
the new state as a fact, and at the same time treated 
themselves to an orgy of land-grabbing in Africa. This 
was the other side of the shield in the development of 
Africa and an element that had had no place in the 
dreams of Stanley and Livingstone. 

The end of Stanley’s active field work in Africa was 
approaching, but the tragedy of Gordon at Khartoum 
set for him one of the hardest tasks he had yet faced. 
This disaster endangered all the work that white men 
had done in the Nile region and spread unrest through 
all the country. In the fever of development that had 
preceded this, a great province had been created on 
the extreme Upper Nile called Equatoria. Emin Pasha 
was Governor, a man with supposedly great ability and 
high reputation, but marked by a tragic futility when 
the supreme test came. 

While England was aghast at the news from Khar¬ 
toum word came out by native runners from Emin that 
he was besieged and in grave peril at Wadelai, north 
of Lake Albert. It was a job for a strong man if he 


The Maker of Africa 25 

was to be reached, and Stanley undertook it. The date 
was early in 1887. 

The route lay up the Congo, although the force was 
recruited in Zanzibar. It was 540 miles from Zam- 
buya, then the head of navigation, to Lake Albert, and 
the whole way led through unknown country. The 
force advanced in two columns with Stanley in charge 
of the leading force, four other Europeans and 384 
natives under him. 

At first it was merely tedious, cutting their way 
through dense jungle. After the first month it was a 
tale of trouble, fever, hunger, fatigue, fear. By the 
time they had passed out of the slave-raiding zone, 137 
days from Zambuya, 180 men had been lost from 
death and desertion. 

The days that followed were spent in vain searching 
for Emin, in blind wandering, and in tireless effort. 
A hundred and sixty-nine days through a grass country 
filled with game brought them to the appointed rendez¬ 
vous with Emin on Lake Albert. But there was no 
sight or sign of the beleaguered governor. Back they 
marched twenty-one days to the village of Ibwiri where 
they built Fort Bodo to serve as a fortified base. 

Here they picked up a sectional steel boat which had 
been left on the first march because of lack of carriers. 
Back again to Lake Albert. This time there was a 
letter from Emin at the village of Kavalli. 

After more waiting Emin himself appeared. Still 
nothing was done. Stanley waited twenty-five days 
while Emin considered and debated and postponed. 
Even Welsh patience had its limits, and Stanley went 


26 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

back to Fort Bodo without Emin, thinking to meet 
his own rear column there. More disappointment. 
Nothing had been heard of them. It was as though 
the jungle had swallowed them up. 

Leaving the other Europeans at Fort Bodo, Stanley 
set out with picked natives on the back trail. The 
remnants of the column he found at Banalza, only 
ninety miles east of Zambuya, the starting point. The 
major in charge had been shot by some people of 
Tippu-Tib, Stanley’s Arab friend of early Lualaba 
days. Another white officer had gone back to Stanley 
Falls for more carriers, and the rest of the Europeans, 
broken by the climate, were fit only to be invalided 
home. Out of an original force of 260 natives, 158 
were dead, and the rest were worse than useless. 

Tireless in spite of all obstacles, Stanley organized a 
fresh force of 500 men and started again for Fort 
Bodo. This time his way led through the country of 
the pigmies. He had heard of them often and per¬ 
haps seen a few, but never before had he been in their 
country. They were pigmies, indeed. The tallest man 
seen by the explorer was only four feet six inches in 
height. The average was around four feet two inches, 
and many women were no more than three feet. 

From the time he left Fort Bodo until he returned 
again five days before Christmas in 1888 he had spent 
188 days on the trail and at the work of reorganizing 
the column. Emin was still of many minds, and wasted 
much time in vague debate and in panicky tales of the 
revolt that he seemed to see hovering over him con¬ 
stantly. Evidently Khartoum had got on Emin’s 


27 


The Maker of Africa 

nerves and his fears urged him to leave at once under 
Stanley’s protection. But pride or some other emotion 
urged him to stay and defend his province of 
Equatoria. 

Finally Stanley’s patience came to an end and he 
started for the East Coast, taking Emin and a thou¬ 
sand of Emin’s people with him. Again he was pass¬ 
ing through new country. It was a land of high moun¬ 
tains. Many whites had been near the Ruwenzori 
range. Stanley was the first to see and report their 
great bulk towering 18,000 feet into the air with the 
last 3,000 covered with perpetual snow. These were 
the half-mythical Mountains of the Moon that were 
finally explored by the Duke of the Abruzzi about 
1907. 

He also located Lake Albert Edward, the fabled 
Sea of Darkness of which Herodotus had heard 400 
years before the birth of Christ. The long trek came 
to an end at Bagamayo on the shore of the Indian 
Ocean, December 4, 1889. Nearly three years had 
elapsed since the start of this third great African trip 
and the one that was to be his last. 

A tragic footnote should be added on Emin Pasha. 
Stanley quarreled violently with him after their arrival 
at the coast and reported that he had discovered that 
Emin, supposedly in the service of England, was really 
in the pay of Germany. Afterwards he wandered off 
into the Great Forest in the direction of Stanley Falls. 
Here he fell in with Ismaili, a deserter from Stanley, 
and Said Bin-Abed. The latter was a kinsman of 
Arabs whom Emin was accused of having drowned in 


28 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

Lake Victoria. At Said’s order the renegade Ismaili 
bound Emin and beheaded him, an inglorious enough 
end for the man who had been the ambitious ruler of a 
great province. 

This was the last of Stanley’s African wanderings. 
He had crossed the continent twice and had unlocked 
its dark secrets. He had cleared away the doubts 
around the location of four lakes, had traced the 
course of one of the mightiest rivers on the globe, the 
Congo, and discovered the true source of another, the 
Nile. He had given a definiteness to vague rumors 
about lofty mountains and dark forests. He had settled 
forever the question of the existence of pigmies, and 
he had made treaties of trade and sovereignty with 
savage tribes who had known no white man before he 
came. 

He had laid the foundation for an equatorial empire 
which is today one of the chief assets of little Belgium 
whose King saw with almost as bold a vision as Stan¬ 
ley. Abuses there were in the administration of the 
Congo Free State—none of them, however, to be laid 
at Stanley’s door—but when he passed the work of 
the slave-raider ceased and tribal wars became less and 
less frequent. He was a hard driver, but he drove 
himself always the hardest. He was a white man with 
a white man’s vision and ambition, but he dealt fairly 
with the blacks. He kept his word and they trusted 
as well as feared him. 

The last fifteen years of his life were far from lazy, 
but the adventuring ended at Bagamayo in 1889. Once 
again he saw Africa. This was just before the South 


The Maker of Africa 29 

Africa war in 1897 when he was the chief orator at 
the opening of the railway from Cape Colony to Bulu- 
wayo. This time also he saw Victoria Falls In the 
Zambezi, a cataract that he might have seen twenty 
years before had he decided to go south Instead of 
north down the Lualaba. 

Marriage, a brief political career, the quiet life of 
an English country home were to be his before he died 
In 1904. Bula-Matarl—Breaker of Rocks—the 
natives called him, and It was a better name than they 
knew. From the days of St. Asaph’s workhouse, where 
he beat the superintendent at his own rough game, to 
the day when he delivered Emin Pasha safe on the 
shores of the Indian Ocean, he was a breaker of rocks 
that blocked his way. And the greatest rock of all 
was the flinty heart of Africa. 


II 


CHINESE GORDON, SOLDIER AND MARTYR 

From the beginnings of Scottish history the name 
of Gordon has been associated with fighting. It was 
a bold clan and a busy one. Before the days of the 
Union of England and Scotland they fought with the 
foremost against the hatred Southron. Doubtless they 
accepted the alliance with as good grace as they could 
muster, with some regret for the passing of the old 
days of slaughter along the border, but having gone 
over to the English side with the Stuarts, they found it 
hard to change again to order. At least we find it 
recorded that four Gordons were executed at Market 
Cross in Edinburgh for the Young Pretender when the 
uprising failed in 1715. That was the day when 
Scotchmen could be found fighting under every flag but 
their own. Four Gordons had already won high rank 
under Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. One was high 
in the service of Peter the Great in Russia. Holland 
had a regiment officered entirely by Scotchmen. There 
were eleven Gordons named among the chieftains who 
failed at Culloden and two were executed after the 
battle. Four who had fled into exile were specifically 
exempted from the Act of Indemnity when England 
recovered from the delirium of blood that succeeded 
Culloden. 


30 


31 


Soldier and Martyr 

So much is necessary to throw the shadow of the 
Gordon name forward over Charles Gordon, who was 
to be known better as Chinese Gordon. To know his 
fighting ancestry is to know something of the force that 
drove him forward all his life and also to know some¬ 
thing of the rebellious spirit that more than once made 
him a thorn in the side of the orderly bureau chiefs in 
London. He was born in the army and trained to 
arms. His father was Gen. H. W. Gordon of the 
Royal Artillery, and he was educated at Taunton 
School and the Royal Military Academy. 

When the Crimean war broke out he had been a 
second lieutenant in the Royal Engineers less than 
three years, and this was his first taste of active ser¬ 
vice. Little need be said about his career in the Cri¬ 
mea. His part was small, and the English per¬ 
formance as a whole inglorious and wasteful of men 
and materials. Gordon took part in the attack on the 
Redan, an important Russian fort, and the kindest 
thing is to say merely that the attack failed. He had 
numerous tours of duty in the trenches, in one period 
of three months having been forty times in the front 
lines for twenty hours each time. He had little sym¬ 
pathy with fighting of this kind and no great ability to 
work agreeably with other men in a subordinate 
capacity. Yet the Gordon blood had its voice in him 
too. After the fall of Sebastopol he was set to work 
blowing up docks, warehouses, arsenals, and other 
works around the harbor. At this time he wrote home 
to his sister, his faithful correspondent his life long: 
“I expect to remain abroad for three or four years, 


32 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

which individually I would sooner spend in war than 
in peace. There is something indescribably exciting 
in the former.” 

He nearly had his wish, although his war was with 
storm and desert and privation. After his work at 
Sebastopol he was sent to Bessarabia, the region be¬ 
tween the Danube and Dniester, now a part of Rou- 
mania, to mark out the new frontier. It was one of 
the numberless futile attempts to determine something 
that would not stay determined. He had a year of 
this, and then orders came to go down beyond the 
Caspian Sea and take charge of the work of laying out 
the new boundary between Russia and Turkey in Asia. 
It was a wild and a savage land in which he traveled 
from May to October. His Turkish companion had 
not been provided with funds by his government so he 
levied in true Turk fashion on passing caravans for 
horses and mules and supplies. Gordon traveled and 
camped with wild Kurds, visited Ani, the old capital 
of Armenia, now a mass of ruins clinging to a moun¬ 
tain side in a desert land, and climbed almost to the 
top of Ararat, a feat that has been accomplished by 
few Europeans even to this day. One outstanding 
incident of these months was a visit to Lazistan, the 
chief slave market for Constantinople. It was his first 
contact with the institution that was later to cause him 
anxious days and sleepless nights in Egypt. 

When he returned to England in November, 1857, 
he had seen enough of war and privation, pestilence 
and famine, to be entitled to call himself a veteran. 
He had rubbed shoulders with the oldest peoples of 


Soldier and Martyr 


33 


earth and the newest, he had seen the desert sand 
blowing over the seat of civilizations that were old 
before recorded history began. He had filled his mind 
full of the tumults and disorders and dangers of the 
Near East in which he was to be in some way involved 
during most of his life, and which we have not seen 
settled or greatly abated even in our own time. Dur¬ 
ing a second tour of this boundary work between Rus¬ 
sia and Turkey he lashed out over the constant friction 
between the alien races under his command, and wrote 
to his sister this characteristic comment: “I am pretty 
tired of my post of peacemaker, for which I am natu¬ 
rally not well adapted.” Never did a Gordon write 
a truer word. 

All these were incidents, a prelude to the work that 
he entered upon in 1860. Out in China there was 
trouble brewing, and war had been declared by Eng¬ 
land. It is wise here to center our vision on Gordon 
rather than on his government. From the standpoint 
of the English the war itself and some of the phases of 
the conduct of it were anything but creditable. In the 
earlier stages he was in the north and took part in the 
capture of Peking, and was present at the sacking of 
the Summer Palace, a feat that might well have been 
performed by barbarians but is hard to believe of Euro¬ 
peans. In this northern campaign he seems to have 
borne a purely subordinate part, and the thing that 
interested him most was his visit to the Great Wall of 
China, two hundred miles northwest of Peking. This 
barrier, built as a defense against the Tartars two 
thousand years ago, stretches fifteen hundred miles in 


34 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

length, over mountain ranges, across rivers, through 
bleak deserts. In Gordon’s time it was a country in¬ 
fested with brigands where the foreigner rode daily 
with his life in his hands. 

This was a time of great unrest and anti-foreign 
feeling in China, and there was an active rebellion in 
progress in the south that was beginning to threaten 
the European settlement at Shanghai. The Taiping 
rebellion had begun in 1850 as an anti-foreign, almost 
a religious, movement. As it spread it lost its religious 
and most of its patriotic character and became largely 
a campaign for loot. The leader was one Hung Sin 
Tsuan who had taken the title of Tien Wang, or 
Heavenly King. City after city had fallen into his 
hands. Nanking, a large and flourishing center, had 
been taken and made the Taiping capital, and the 
rebels’ eyes were fixed on Shanghai, a rich prize for 
looting. The Europeans in Shanghai had become 
alarmed for their safety and had raised an army of 
their own, a private army, in fact. The commander 
was Frederick Townsend Ward, an American. Under 
Ward this nondescript army won ground against the 
rebels and acquired the title of the Ever-Victorious. 
It was Ward’s lot to give the Chinese soldiers in his 
force a taste of that rare experience to Chinese, a vic¬ 
tory in arms. 

The fighting in the north being long since finished, 
Gordon’s superior. General Stuveley, was ordered to 
Shanghai and Gordon perforce went with him. Now 
he steps out of the crowd for the first time. Ward 
was killed in battle and his successor, Burgevine, an 


35 


Soldier and Martyr 

American with an early Civil War record and a bad 
temper, soon quarreled with Li Hung Chang, then Gov¬ 
ernor of Kiang-su. Gordon was put in command of 
the Ever-Victorious Army in 1863, and then began the 
kind of fighting that was always dear to his heart. 
Though an engineer officer, he must some time have 
taken lessons in cavalry tactics. At any rate, the essence 
of his plan of action was speed. It was this element 
of surprise that gained him his victories against the 
Chinese rebels. 

The fighting was over a flat land gridironed with 
canals and rivers. The movement of troops was 
doubly difficult, and the difficulties increased with each 
success. The Chinese could not understand the neces¬ 
sity of marching to another attack immediately after 
the one that they had won. They wanted time to cele¬ 
brate, time to loaf and gamble away their winnings, 
time to rest and recount their triumphs. This foreign 
devil who drove them from battle to battle and from 
siege to siege, what did he think they were made of? 
He seems to have annoyed his own men almost as 
much as he did the enemy. He relieved Chan-su, which 
was surrounded by the rebels, and then captured the 
large city of Suchow by the simple expedient of march¬ 
ing around and attacking in the least likely and there¬ 
fore the weakest place. 

At this stage he quarreled with Li Hung Chang be¬ 
cause the latter ordered the beheading of the rebel 
leaders who had surrendered on Gordon’s promise 
that their lives would be spared. This breach was 
healed. There was short shrift for the towns that 


36 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

remained in the hands of the rebels. Chanchufu fell 
in May and then Tien Wang committed suicide. 
Nanking, the capital, fell soon after, and the rebellion 
was over. 

After the capture of Suchow and again at the end 
of the rebellion, Gordon twice refused a large gift of 
gold offered by the Emperor of China. Then there 
was conferred upon him the grade of Titu, the high¬ 
est rank in the Chinese army, and he received also 
the order of the Yellow Jacket, the highest decora¬ 
tion. This order made him one of the chosen twenty 
of the Emperor’s bodyguard. It also entitled him to 
wear the Mandarin’s hat, although he resented the 
gold button that it bore. “They can not afford it over 
well,” he writes. His own government made him a 
lieutenant colonel for his work in China, and the world 
gave him the name of Chinese Gordon. 

Then his government landed him at Gravesend, be¬ 
low London, in charge of the erection of the forts on 
the Thames, and proceeded to forget him for the next 
six years. England was busy in many parts of the 
world, but she had no better post for this energetic 
and often peppery servant of hers. 

His work for the government apparently gave him 
abundant leisure for other things. It was a poor sec¬ 
tion of the city and there was great need for the sort 
of active, fiery sympathy that a Gordon could supply. 
The sea was at hand and he busied himself with the 
boys of the district, finding them places on board ship 
and sending them forth to all the ports of the world. 
On the wall of his study hung a great map on which 


37 


Soldier and Martyr 

the positions of his “kings,” as he called them, were 
marked with pins. As word came back from the Seven 
Seas the pins moved here and there till the map was 
dotted with the boys that he had picked from the 
gutter and set on their feet. 

The question of boundaries that had followed the 
Crimean War was still a vexing one, and he was sent 
out to the Danube in 1871 as a member of the British 
commission to determine navigation rights on that 
river. It was on this trip that the shadow of Egypt 
fell across him. In Constantinople he met Nubar 
Pasha, the Prime Minister of Egypt, and was invited 
to take over the job of settling the muttering tribes of 
the upper Nile country. Even then the storm center 
was Khartoum, later to be linked with Gordon’s name 
in tragic memory. Khartoum lies at the junction of 
the Blue and the White Nile eighteen hundred miles 
south of Cairo. Its name means the Elephant’s Trunk, 
from the shape of the long, low spit of land on which it 
lies. 

The hold of the Egyptian government on the 
wandering tribes of this section had always been of 
the slenderest. Where the Egyptian boundaries 
marched with the Abyssinian, war was always just 
around the corner, and raiding back and forth across 
the line was the most popular sport. The principal 
article of commerce was slaves, black ivory as the poor 
chattels were called. The country was a vast, sandy 
waste with a narrow ribbon of fertility where the Nile 
stretched its crooked length, and little dots of green 
here and there where well or waterhole provided relief 


38 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

from the thirst that every tribesman knew as his almost 
daily portion. 

Above Khartoum a subordinate province had been 
established under the name of Equatoria of which Sir 
Samuel Baker, a celebrated African hunter and ex¬ 
plorer, was governor. A year after his meeting with 
Nubar at Constantinople, Gordon received an offer of 
the headship of this province from the Khedive to suc¬ 
ceed Baker. When he reached Khartoum in 1874 news 
had just come down that the “sud,” a mass of floating 
vegetation that obstructed boat travel in the upper 
Nile, had broken up and the way was clear to Gondo- 
koro, a thousand miles above Khartoum. It was 
twenty-six weary days of upstream work that brought 
Gordon to this*province of Equatoria, through a land 
of nakedness, stripped by the slaver. Read two sen¬ 
tences from a letter to his sister from Gondokoro: 
“The only possessions Egypt has in my province are 
two forts, one here at Gondokoro, the other at Fate- 
koko; there are three hundred men in one, and two 
hundred in the other. You can’t go out in any safety 
half a mile.” 

From the beginning it was a story of support that 
always failed, of plans that could not be put through 
for lack of adequate assistance. Ismail Yacoob, then 
the governor of Khartoum, forgot Gordon almost as 
soon as his boats were out of sight, and it was necessary 
to travel the long thousand miles back to Khartoum to 
remind that personage that there was a governor in 
Equatoria who, whatever else his shortcomings, was 
not to be overlooked. His staff sickened in the autumn 


39 


Soldier and Martyr 

rains, and by Christmas only one out of the eight was 
fit for service. In desperation he hired Abou Said as 
lieutenant, and learned much from him, including some¬ 
thing in the native art of serving two, or a dozen, mas¬ 
ters at one and the same time. He considered whether 
to reward Abou for his service or kill him for his 
treachery, and finally let him go unharmed, only to 
suffer moments of regret afterwards. A line of sta¬ 
tions was planned from Khartoum to the Great Lakes, 
and steamers were brought up in sections to navigate 
Lake Albert. This was a long struggle with rapids, 
natives, heat, fever, and despair. Tall jungle grass 
shrouded the river. By day the heat beat down relent¬ 
lessly, and by night the damp rose out of the drenched 
ground to shake them with chill. “A dead, mourn¬ 
ful spot, with a heavy damp dew penetrating every¬ 
thing. It is as if the Angel Azrael had spread his 
wings over this land.” 

The upper part of the river and Lake Albert were 
mapped, and a route was proposed from Mombasa on 
the shore of the Indian Ocean to the interior and the 
abandonment of the attempt to maintain connections 
by the LFpper Nile. Col. Long, an American, went on 
a mission to King Mtesa of Uganda, and reported a 
practicable route through a rich fertile country. Sheikh 
Beddar of the Bari tribe opposed their passage, and it 
was necessary to levy tribute to the tune of twenty- 
six hundred cattle. Unfortunately they found that the 
cattle belonged to a friendly tribe and it was equally 
necessary to return them. Out of his experiences in 
this land Gordon was moved to fulminate against the 


40 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

customary ways of the white man with the native, 
“They weigh the actions of ignorant natives after their 
own code; they act toward the native after the natives’ 
code, which recognizes the right of the stronger to 
pillage his neighbor. Oh! I am sick of these people. 
It is they, and not the blacks, who need civilization.” 
This was the spirit of Gordon speaking. When the 
need came he, too, could strike with a heavy hand. 

The end of that year saw also the end of Gordon’s 
patience with his new post, and on his way back to 
London. He had delivered his ultimatum to the Khe¬ 
dive, apparently without effect. England was just then 
indulging in an orgy of colonial aggressiveness, Quetta, 
the Transvaal, Syria, Egypt. Gordon found himself 
out of touch and out of sympathy with this highly 
energized, highly commercialized process of exploita¬ 
tion, and sought to resign from the Egyptian service. 
The Khedive urged him to return and finally, after the 
fashion of Orientals, offered the thing that he had 
refused to grant at Gordon’s demand, namely, the 
governorship of the whole Soudan. 

It was one of the rare occasions of high tide in the 
Egyptian treasury. The government had sold Suez 
Canal bonds to England for four million pounds ster¬ 
ling and immediately decided to use these funds for a 
war of looting and land-grabbing against Abyssinia. 
Unfortunately, while Egypt had the money the Abys- 
sinians had the fighting men, and the loot for the black 
mountaineers was great. So much gold fell into the 
hands of the victors that they believed it counterfeit, 


Soldier and Martyr 41 

and the spectacle was seen of Abyssinian soldiers trad¬ 
ing thirty gold sovereigns for a few pieces of silver. 

Gordon landed at Massowah on the Red Sea close 
on the heels of this disaster and found the whole dis¬ 
trict seething with incipient rebellion. Egyptian pres¬ 
tige had suffered a heavy blow, and the magic of Cairo 
was sadly dimmed. The slavers of Darfour had risen 
and the new governor found himself squarely against 
the necessity of fighting slavery not as an evil but as a 
positive menace to his power and the foundation of a 
political force. He was at Khartoum only two weeks, 
but long enough to disband the Bashi-Bazouks, as the 
disreputable palace guards were called, to set a petition 
box at the palace door, and to order the money paid 
to clerks as baksheesh, or bribes, to be turned into the 
treasury. 

Then he set his face westward toward Darfour. In 
less than three weeks he covered four hundred miles 
on camel back. During the greater part of the time he 
outran his escort and his only companion was an Arab 
Sheikh. Even in that empty land where news travels 
almost with the speed of the telegraph his coming fol¬ 
lowed hard upon the heels of the rumor that he was 
on his way. It was the story of China over again. 
Fast as his troops overtook him he struck and struck 
again. The wells were the keys to that dry land and 
he seized and held them. He freed the slaves and 
trained them as soldiers. The first phase of the re¬ 
volt, that against the government, he soon suppressed, 
and then turned his attention to the slave kings. Here 
he had the sympathy of the people with him, but they 


42 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

had known the yoke of the oppressor so long that they 
were poor material for soldiers. “Three hundred 
determined men would send them rushing to my 
house,” says Gordon, and there were three thousand 
slavers at Dara to the south of Darfour where he 
struck first. Gordon, a “single, red-faced man on a 
camel ornamented with flies,” arrived, delivered his 
ultimatum, “disarm and go home,” and won. The 
bold stroke had succeeded. The next step was a hun¬ 
dred and eighty miles in six days to Shaka, headquar¬ 
ters of the slavers, to receive their submission. “Shaka 
is the cave of Adullam; all murderers, robbers, etc., 
assembled there, and thence made raids upon the negro 
tribes for slaves.” 

Again the bold game won, and he struck straight 
for El Obeid in Kordofan, across three hundred and 
eighty miles of misery. Again he won. And now the 
supreme tragedy became manifest. Everywhere he 
had won and nowhere had success remained. The 
slaver followed close at his heels and the trade sprang 
up again almost as soon as the dust from his camel’s 
hoofs had died on the horizon. It was the only trade 
in that forlorn land and it was more than one man could 
do to change a practice of centuries. Gordon knew it 
now, but he kept on. On the road to Shaka he wrote: 
“Find me the man and I will take him as my help, who 
utterly despises money, name, glory, honor; one who 
never wishes to see his home again; one who looks to 
God as the source of good and the controller of evil; 
one who has a healthy body and energetic spirit, and 
jvho looks on death as a release from misery; and if 


43 


Soldier and Martyr 

you cannot find him then leave me alone. To carry 
myself is enough for me—I want no other baggage.” 

There was no time or place in Gordon’s life these 
days for the ordinary courtesies and observances of 
official life. Financial clouds were thickening around 
the Khedive’s head. Interest on the Egyptian bonds 
held in Europe was in arrears. The four million 
pounds that had come into the Treasury from the sale 
of the canal bonds had been thrown away along the 
Abyssinian border and there was no money left. Gor¬ 
don cut his salary in half to convince the government 
of his sincerity, but there was no interest in such self- 
sacrifice at Cairo. Summoned to a conference, he 
strode into the Khedive’s palace as he arrived from his 
long journey, dirty and bedraggled. The Khedive gave 
him the place of honor at his right hand, but the for¬ 
eign representatives snubbed him, and he stood around 
the palace ill at ease and friendless. This man was 
more at home on the back of a racing camel riding 
across the desert to overawe the slave kings than in the 
midst of European intrigue. He walked out of the 
palace and made his way back to Khartoum. 

Here the tangle was growing worse. The year be¬ 
fore he had begun the railroad from Wadi Haifa to 
Dongola, a work that would have meant much a few 
years later if it could have been completed. But the 
tragedy of this futile effort was that nothing was ever 
finished. A false rumor of war with Abyssinia had 
called him away and he was fated not to return. 

Now there was war threatened in two or three quar¬ 
ters, and Gordon had no money with which to fight. 


44 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

There were times when he, the governor of all Soudan, 
was hard put to it to find fifty pounds. At the head of 
the White Nile was the province of Bahr el Gazelle. 
The greatest chieftain of the province, Zebehr Rahma 
(or Pasha), the ablest Arab of the century, had 
dreamed a dream of a native empire. Enticed to 
Cairo on promises of safe conduct, two years before, 
he was still there a prisoner in spite of the promises. 
His son Suleiman had started a revolt, and Gordon 
took the field to help his lieutenant Gessi. The revolt 
was crushed, but the army was half-naked and unpaid. 
The problem of slavery still remained, and skulls lined 
the caravan trails. Gordon rode fast in every direc¬ 
tion, fighting, freeing, feeding; but misery and unrest 
traveled faster. In May of 1878 he covered 630 miles 
by camel. 

Ismail, the Khedive at Cairo, who had trusted Gor¬ 
don more than he trusted anyone else, and probably 
more than anyone else in that day of intrigue and jeal¬ 
ousy trusted Gordon, had reached the end of his tether 
and news came up the Nile that he had been deposed in 
favor of his nephew Tewfik. To Gordon now fell the 
task of conciliating Ras Aloula of Abyssinia. This 
journey took him into the mountains where the Egyp¬ 
tian army had been cut to pieces three years before 
and then twenty-four days farther over terrible moun¬ 
tain trails. And at the end of the trail was Johannes, 
king of Abyssinia, with the ultimatum that there could 
be no peace until the lands wrested from Abyssinia 
seven hundred years before had been restored. 


45 


Soldier and Martyr 

Memories live long among mountain people and Gor¬ 
don gave up in despair, made his way out, and resigned. 

The next three years are hard to trace. It was a 
period of vacillation and contradiction. Gordon was 
out of touch and sympathy with affairs in England and 
seems hardly to have known his own mind two weeks 
on end. Lord Ripon was going out to India as viceroy 
and Gordon in an insane moment accepted the post as 
his secretary. There is no other way to characterize 
the mood of this savage man straight from wild work 
in barbarous lands who thought he could settle down 
to tame routine work under a bureau-trained executive. 
He lasted exactly three days after reaching India, and 
applied for leave to go to China where war was 
threatening with Russia. Leave was refused and he 
resigned by cable, throwing over his pension equity 
which by that time amounted to about six thousand 
pounds. He wanted to go to China and he went—on 
borrowed money. It was the fate of Gordon to be 
misunderstood and distrusted by his own race and kind, 
but to carry weight with the tottering governments of 
earth. Apparently his blunt directness was a welcome 
relief from the indirection and suavity of Orientals 
but an annoyance and an offense at home. 

In Peking he stood before the Council of Ministers 
and warned them that war with Russia would be 
“idiocy.” The interpreter refused to translate the 
objectionable word and Gordon knew enough Chinese 
to detect the omission. Seizing an Anglo-Chinese dic¬ 
tionary he opened it at the word and shoved it under 
their noses. Apparently their belief in him outweighed 


46 Boys^ Own Book of "Adventurers 

any resentment over his plain speech. At any rate 
after Gordon came there was no more talk of war with 
Russia. In the meantime his own country remained 
indifferent. His leave was cancelled—it was a small 
matter to the War Office that it had never been granted 
—his resignation was refused, and he was left to loaf 
around England at loose ends without assignment or 
occupation. 

There was a brief tour in Mauritius where there was 
less than nothing to do. And then in 1882 he was 
called to South Africa to help in treating with the 
Basutos. Here he found a native war that was the 
result of a form of practical joking that the Basutos 
were naturally unable to appreciate. In the early days 
of the mining industry in South Africa they had been 
hired to work in the mines. By the consent of the 
government they had been paid in guns and ammuni¬ 
tion rather than in other goods or money. Then the 
government awakened to the fact that the natives were 
being rather too heavily armed and an order went 
forth to them to turn in all their arms forthwith. While 
Gordon was treating with the chief, the government 
started a military expedition in the field and he threw 
up his task and returned to England. 

The time was growing short now and he had but a 
few months left for archeological study in Palestine, 
which he had long contemplated. Then the last call 
came for action in the Soudan. The district was to 
be evacuated, and a peaceful government was to be 
set up in the stead of the feeble, tottering image that 
Egypt had maintained. Just how that paradox was 


47 


Soldier and Martyr 

to be accomplished his instructions did not indicate, nor 
even how the apparently simple feat of evacuation was 
to be carried out. There was no support for him at 
Cairo and no troops to guard the line of retreat. Since 
he was last at Khartoum a monk from the island of 
Abba in the Nile, Mahomet Achma, had announced 
himself as the Mahdi, the legitimate descendant of the 
prophet, and raised the green banner of Mohammedan 
rule. The tribes flocked to him and Khartoum was 
already in danger when Gordon arrived there in Febru¬ 
ary, 1884. 

There were eighteen hundred miles of river and 
desert between him and Cairo and six cataracts in the 
Nile that must be passed on the way. There was little 
enough time to do the work if it had been begun at 
once, and England hesitated. To be sure there was 
fighting around Suakim and a useless slaughter of 
Arabs at Tamai which served only to infuriate the 
Mahdi’s forces. Berber fell in April, and hope fell 
with it. It was the beginning of the end, but Gordon 
held on. The issue was clear. He could only wait and 
look for the help that he doubted would come. He 
was cut off from Cairo practically from the day he 
reached Khartoum. 

Little is known of the first six months of the siege. 
His journal which was recovered in part is a strange 
mixture of notes of events and religious reflections. 
The belief grew in his mind that he had been selected 
as the atonement for the sins of England in the Sou¬ 
dan. Again he resents the idea that an expedition is 
being formed to rescue him. “I am not the rescued 


48 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

lamb and I will not be.” At another time he wrote, 
“I have the strongest suspicion that these tales of 
troops at Dongola and Meroe are all gas-works and 
that if you wanted to find Her Majesty’s forces you 
would have to go to Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo.” 

But the time was not passed in watching and repin¬ 
ing. There were 60,000 people in Khartoum at the 
beginning of the siege and they had to be fed. There 
were traitors among them and they had to be found 
out and dealt with. Even the clerks in the palace failed 
him, but he held on. After one pitched battle in which 
the defenders were beaten, the leaders. Said and Has- 
san, were tried and executed as traitors. With the 
rising of the Nile in September came the great chance 
of relief, and the steamer Abbas was sent down stream 
with Gordon’s white aids, Stewart and Power, and 
Harbin, the French consul, and eighteen Greeks went 
with her. The Abbas was destroyed a short way below 
the city and out of the sands along the shore, months 
after, the relief force picked mute, scattered evidence 
of the disaster. A bit of nameless diary found here told 
one story of Gordon. Before the steamer left he had 
gone in to the bazaars and bought hundreds of yards 
of cotton cloth. Dyeing this an earth color, he stretched 
it in long, sloping lines to make it appear at a distance 
like earthworks that the besieged had thrown up for 
the defense of the city. The material out of which he 
had constantly to rebuild his army was the dregs and 
scrapings of the force that had been beaten steadily for 
four years. Spies were everywhere, and he matched them 
with other spies. In addition he corresponded con- 


Soldier and Martyr 49 

stantly with the Arab chiefs, striving to overcome the 
influence of the Mahdi. 

It was not until September that the boats for the 
ascent of the Nile were sent out from England, and at 
the end of the month Gordon heard that relief was 
under way and sent armed steamers to Metemma to 
wait for them. It was after this that a messenger 
came through from down river with a dispatch from an 
official in Cairo demanding to be “informed exactly 
when he expects to be in difficulties as to provisions 
and ammunition.’’ Gordon might have answered 
“since the siege began.” On October 21, the Arab 
New Year, 1302, the Mahdi appeared before Khar¬ 
toum, and Gordon learned for the first time of the loss 
of the Abhas nearly two months before. On the first 
of November food was down to six weeks’ supply on 
short rations, and the relief force was still at Wadi 
Haifa, 500 miles away, as the crow flies, with five Nile 
cataracts between and the bleak stretches of the Nubian 
and the Bayuda deserts to be crossed if they forsook 
the river. 

In the middle of December the curtain shut down. 
That was the date of Gordon’s farewell message and 
the last word to get through to the outside world. His 
dispatch contained also a careful itemizing of all his 
debts, and a request that they be charged against what¬ 
ever pension or back pay was due him. There were 
only 14,000 left in the city out of the 60,000 at the 
beginning of the year, and desertions were daily occur¬ 
rences. And still he held—held for forty-three days. 

The last chapter was written in the early morning of 


50 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

January 26. Two days later two steamers loaded with 
soldiers under the command of Sir Charles Wilson 
came in sight of the city only to be greeted by hostile 
fire. No flag flew from the palace roof, and there was 
no word of Gordon. Piece by piece the information 
came out that in the dim, hot January dawn the 
Mahdi’s men had rushed the gates and stormed 
through the streets to intercept Gordon on his way to 
the Church of the Austrian Mission which had been 
selected on account of its thick walls and small win¬ 
dows as the place for the last stand. About twenty 
of his men died with him, the feeble shadow of the 
army that Egypt and England, his mother country, had 
promised him. The evacuation of the Soudan had 
been completed and Gordon’s task was done. 

There followed long discussions of right and wrong. 
There were parliamentary inquiries, newspaper cam¬ 
paigns, accusation and denial, glorification of Gordon 
and charges of treachery against the men who failed 
to support him. A queer, half-knightly, half-rebel 
soul himself, he had doubtless more than once antago¬ 
nized those whose help he should have sought, often 
demanded authority for himself while refusing to 
recognize it in others. But in this last great stand at 
Khartoum he had tried with all the strength that was 
in him to do the work that he had been sent to do, and 
those who sent him stood and watched him die. On 
that point the record is clear. 

In him was much of the spirit of his seventeenth cen¬ 
tury Highland ancestry, cold courage in battle, hot 
anger at a slight, real or fancied, to himself, fanatic 


5r 


Soldier and Martyr 

devotion to something that he himself could only partly 
describe, fidelity to a charge coupled with deep resent¬ 
ment at any interference with his own chosen way of 
pursuing that fidelity. That was Chinese Gordon, 
faithful servant of England whom few English ever 
knew or loved. Even in the loud outcry that followed 
his death there was more of political animosity against 
the administration that permitted his betrayal than 
there was of devotion to the man betrayed. 

News came ten years later that Kitchener had scat¬ 
tered the forces of the Mahdi at Omdurman and 
brought to an end the years of chaos in the Soudan. 
That night thousands of Londoners crowded around 
Gordon’s statue cheering and singing and some one 
chalked on the pedestal “Revenged at last.” If the 
spirit of Gordon saw it and smiled it was a smile of 
irony and bitter recollection. 


Ill 


BURNHAM, THE LAST OF THE SCOUTS 

Major Frederick Russell Burnham came by his 
scouting proclivities honestly and early. When he was 
born on the Reservation of the Winnebago Indians 
at Tivoli, Minnesota, in 1861, that country was still 
Indian country, and settlers held their claims at the 
almost constant risk of their lives. It was fifteen years 
before the battle of the Little Big Horn that brought 
death and undying fame to General Custer and threat¬ 
ened all the Western country with a red uprising. 

He was still a babe in arms when Red Cloud burned 
New Ulm near Tivoli and all through the terrors of 
one flaming night he was hidden from the Indians 
under a shock of corn. His father was a missionary 
and when young Burnham was nine years old the 
family migrated to Los Angeles, then little more than 
a thriving village. His father lived only a short time 
after the California translation, and a part at least of 
the burden of supporting his mother was thrown on 
the shoulders of this eleven-year-old boy. His first 
definite job was as a mounted messenger carrying tele¬ 
grams from Los Angeles to outlying districts. Eleven 
hours was a fair day’s work and he kept a string of 
four horses busy. “It was this riding that stunted my 
growth,” the little Major told me. It may have checked 

52 


53 


The Last of the Scouts 

his height, but he carries the body of a big man, round 
full chest and broad shoulders. His quiet, keen, blue 
eyes with their friendly twinkle are an eloquent index 
of the character of the man. 

Before he was grown he had been and done more 
things than fall to the lot of most of us during our 
lives. As a hunter, guide, bullion guard, deputy sheriff, 
prospector, he saw much of Arizona, New Mexico, 
northern Old Mexico, and California. There was a 
brief interval of study in the East when he was seven¬ 
teen, but the old settlements were no place for him. 

Back in the Southwest again there was a hectic 
period for fifteen years during which he knew some¬ 
thing of most of the growing pains of that new old 
land. County seat wars, fights between rustlers and 
cattle outfits, bandit hunts, he took part in them all. 
At one time when he was deputy sheriff it was necessary 
for political reasons for him to absent himself from 
the county seat and to be able at the same time to 
account afterwards for his whereabouts on each day 
of his absence. The reason for the maneuver does 
not now matter. He was without a horse and traveled 
on foot and mostly at a jog trot. At stated points, 
ranchhouses, lone telegraph stations, miner’s shacks, 
he recorded his call, with the date, the hour, and his 
signature. Afterwards when called to testify he de¬ 
scribed his course, and it was stated with triumphant 
positiveness by the opposition that no human being, 
Indian or White, could have covered that amount of 
ground in the time given. The records with Burham’s 
signature settled the matter. 


54 


Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

This careful preparation of the case in advance was 
characteristic of the man even from the beginning. 
It was the scout speaking in him. He had been an 
occasional smoker. He gave it up because he dis¬ 
covered that it impaired his sense of smell. He de¬ 
veloped the art of looking sidewise without turning his 
head until he acquired an angle of vision many degrees 
wider than that of the average man. He trained his 
eyes to such good purpose that later the Kaffirs in 
South Africa were to declare that here was a man who 
could see in the dark. He worked habitually and 
steadily at marksmanship until he became past master 
of the art on which his life might at any moment 
depend. Apropos of this, Richard Harding Davis, the 
novelist, once asked him if he could shoot to the rear 
from a galloping horse and hit a man pursuing him. 
“Well,” Major Durham responded, “maybe not to hit 
him, but I can come near enough to make him decide 
that my pony is so much faster than his that it really 
isn’t worth while to follow me.” 

In his experiences with the Apaches, he learned 
something of the skill of these wily fighters in hiding 
themselves on the open prairie that was to stand him 
in good stead in later days in South Africa. Early in 
his Southwestern experience he came under the tutelage 
of an old scout whose teaching was invaluable. Broken 
in health and temper by a trip across a Mexican desert 
that nearly cost him his life, the old man was a hard 
master but a thorough one. He taught the youngster 
to study the appearance of leaves and grass, and to 
carry in his memory the character and direction of the 


55 


The Last of the Scouts 

prevailing wind for the preceding days. Was it hot 
or cold? Wet or dry? What would be the effect of 
either? From which side had the dust blown into the 
track? What’s the difference between the tracks made 
by a riderless horse and one carrying a burden? How 
does a horse walk? Trot? Gallop? What do the 
traces of various insects’ work show? Do ants work 
in the night or day? These were only part of the 
alphabet of scouting that young Burnham learned, a 
knowledge that was later to bring him alive out of the 
Tonta Basin war where his friends, the Grahams, were 
killed to the last man. 

It was to South Africa that his steps now turned 
Our western frontier had passed, and his spirit 
clamored for a new land. Cecil Rhodes was rising to 
fame as the dictator in South Africa and the builder of 
empire, and he had use for men of the Burnham type. 
He turned his great wealth from the diamond and 
gold mines now pouring out their millions to finance 
the colonists whom he sent farther and farther north¬ 
ward to what is now Rhodesia. Many Americans 
joined Rhodes in this great work in Africa, some to 
gain fame and fortune like John Hays Hammond, 
Hennings Jennings, Gardner Williams, and Webb, and 
others to leave their bones on the veldt or fill an un¬ 
marked grave. 

Early in 1893 when Burnham landed in South Africa 
the first Matabele war was in near prospect. The 
Matabeles were kindred of the Zulus, the most war¬ 
like and intelligent of the African tribes. Their terri¬ 
tory was about the size of Germany. Their king was 


56 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

Lo Bengula with his capital at Buluwayo, nearly twelve 
hundred miles on an air line northeast of Capetown. 
The country held a large native population, trained in 
warfare and spoiling for a fight. A slave-raiding 
expedition by Lo Bengula’s general, Inyou, near Vic¬ 
toria, a white settlement in Mashonaland, started the 
war. 

Here was something Burnham knew all about, and 
he volunteered forthwith. He was in Victoria when 
the war broke. It was five hundred miles to the near¬ 
est white settlement in the Transvaal, and retreat 
seemed out of the question for the English settlers, 
cumbered as they were with women and children. The 
total fighting force of the whites was 888 rifles when 
the two columns that took the field had joined. Against 
this handful Lo Bengula had a force that was reported 
to number 10,000 riflemen and 80,000 spearmen. And 
the natives were fighting over ground that they knew 
to the last foot. 

The whites did not even know the exact location of 
Buluwayo, the savage capital. In such desperate case 
they had but one motto, “When in doubt, attack.” The 
headquarters of the whites was at Fort Victoria,* to the 
eastward of Buluwayo. Their leaders were Dr. Lean- 
der Starr Jameson, soon to be the leader of Jame¬ 
son’s raid. Major Forbes, and Major Allan Wilson, 
destined to join the long list of English hero martyrs. 
There were no laggards in that little company. Even 
the women and children had their work assigned. 
Burnham’s seven-year-old son carried a bandolier of 
ammunition to pass out to the men at the loopholes in 


The Last of the Scouts SI 

Fort Victoria. Only boys and old men were left to 
guard the women and children in the improvised fort. 

There was a hurried conference and it was decided 
that the only alternative to hopeless retreat was to 
carry the war to Lo Bengula’s own capital. It was 
reported by natives that there was a route thither that 
would take them through fairly open country, avoiding 
the Samabula Forest and its dangers of ambush. The 
forest would screen the masses of spearmen and enable 
Lo Bengula to repeat the victories of his Zulu fore¬ 
bears against the English and Dutch. 

Burnham and a man named Vaversol, an experienced 
colonial who spoke the native language, volunteered 
to find the way and to come back to show it to their 
comrades. These were Dr. Jameson’s final instruc¬ 
tions: “If one of you should be wounded and unable 
to ride, he must be left to fight it out alone, because 
if the open route is found by either of you and lost 
through one man’s trying to save the other, all our 
people will be lost, but if either of you should find the 
trail and be able to guide our force into Buluwayo, we 
shall win the war.” 

All they knew except the general direction was a 
certain flat-topped mountain, the Mountain of the 
Chiefs, overlooking Buluwayo. When they rode out 
on their adventure through a district swarming with 
natives, they carried the hopes of all the whites in that 
country with them. 

From the first they were threatened with ambush 
but they eluded all attempts, thanks to their horses. 
The first night they stopped at some deserted huts 


58 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

where they found kaffir corn for their horses. These 
they hid in a hollow where they could not be seen 
against the skyline. Resting till midnight, they rode 
on again. It was slow work. Not only must they 
scan the country ahead and on both sides for possible 
danger and for landmarks that might be remembered 
against a later need, but they must study the back track 
frequently. Even a country road looks vastly different 
in the reverse direction. Consider this and consider 
then the problem of these two men alone in a trackless, 
unknown country. 

Dawn found them in the rear of the native army that 
had taken the field, but there were many natives about. 
Still they could see nothing that resembled the Moun¬ 
tain of the Chiefs, and they must have native informa¬ 
tion. Riding up a shallow gulley they came upon two 
old women carrying water in jars on their heads. The 
sight of the white men on horseback frightened them 
and as Burnham said afterwards they jumped from 
under their water jars so quickly that the jars struck 
the ground right side up. 

A few words reassured the ladies and in a minute 
they were talking freely. Where was the Mountain of 
the Chiefs? Right there, with a wave of the hand. 
They learned that they had been looking at it for an 
hour. “Would Aunty advise us to call on the King 
today?” “Not exactly today, as he was already 
gathering his ox wagons and his treasure and trekking 
toward the Shangani River, Shiloh, and the north.” 
Also many warriors were in Buluwayo who might be 
glad to spear them on sight. It was not a promising 


59 


The Last of the Scouts 

invitation, but they rode on till from the side of the 
mountain they could see the smoke of Buluwayo. The 
way had been found, but the job was only half done. 
They must carry word of it back to the little column 
of their comrades whose lives depended on it. 

One factor that worked in their favor was the exag¬ 
gerated ideas of the natives about a horse. In their 
minds his endurance was equal to his speed. There¬ 
fore pursuit at any one time was of short duration. 
They rested for the return in wide open country where 
they took turns sleeping. While they rested they 
watched the natives draw a wide circle around them. 
It seemed almost without a break when the two white 
men decided that it was time to go. On one side was a 
Kaffir kraal of over one hundred thatched huts. Evi¬ 
dently the natives did not believe that they would risk 
riding through that and the circle was thinner there. 
The hunted men made a feint toward open country to 
the south and then as the natives rushed with shouts 
toward the threatened spot they turned west and rode 
hard for the kraal. Women and children, herd boys, 
and old men scattered with shrieks as they pelted 
through, and they were out of the circle. 

Still they must find the advancing column and guide 
it away from the deadly forest. Night came and with 
it a cold wind bringing mist. It was impossible to see 
more than a few feet in any direction. Yet they must 
keep on. Hours counted now. There was nothing 
for it but the instinct of direction and the picture of the 
trail that each man carried in his own head. At one 
time Vaversol produced a compass and insisted that 


60 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

they were heading too far north on a route that would 
land them in the Samabula Forest. There was the 
compass and the tale it told was unmistakable. But 
Burnham believed his own sense of direction above any 
compass. He knew the way, and nothing could shake 
that belief. Finally they agreed to separate, Vaversol 
to follow the compass and Burnham his instinct and 
memory of the back trail. A few minutes after they 
parted Burnham heard hoofbeats behind him and 
halted to see what they meant. It was Vaversol over¬ 
taking him. He had decided to trust Burnham rather 
than his compass. 

Once they stopped barely in time, warned by the 
actions of their horses. A few rods more and they 
would have ridden into a native regiment sleeping at 
the edge of the forest. Around midnight Burnham’s 
horse sniffed the ground. It was the place where they 
had unsaddled and rested on the way out. The horses 
had recognized their own odor. At dawn they struck 
the huts where they had found the kaffir corn. Now 
they were sure of their way. Two hours later the fog 
lifted and they reached the scouts thrown out from the 
little column of white troops. They were in time— 
but just in time. Already the column was entering the 
forest and the blacks attacked as they drew out and 
formed a laager to stand off the horde of Matabeles 
who rushed them from the cover of the dense woods. 
This was the big battle of the war, and it surely would 
have gone against the whites had not the two scouts 
returned just in time. Two days later the force reached 
Buluwayo and found it a heap of smoking ruins. Lo 


61 


The Last of the Scouts 

Bengula had fired it, burning his stores of ivory, but 
carrying with him into the jungles of the Shangani his 
treasure. Both treasure and king lie in unknown places 
today. He was buried in a secret place as were his 
fathers before him and with him the great treasure— 
the head-tax of a diamond or a piece of gold per year 
for each of his people working in the mines of Kim¬ 
berley and Johannesberg for years. 

But the war was not yet over with the capture of 
Buluwayo. Lo Bengula was still in the field and 
counted his warriors by thousands. If he could be 
taken or killed the hostiles would vanish. Col. Forbes 
called for volunteers to enter the Matabele camp and 
seize the king. Thirty-eight men responded under 
Wilson. Burnham was one. They crossed the Shan¬ 
gani River and found themselves surrounded by seven 
thousand Matabeles. As soon as the fighting began it 
was seen that the case of the white men was hopeless 
unless help came. Wilson directed Burnham, his 
brother-in-law Ingram, and Gooding, an Australian, 
to cut their way back to Forbes and bring up reinforce¬ 
ments. It was almost the story of the Custer massacre. 
The three messengers had need of all their skill, wood¬ 
craft, courage, and some good luck, but they cut their 
way through in the growing dawn and swam their 
horses across the Shangani. They reached Forbes only 
two hours away, but it might as well have been as many 
days. He was himself hard pressed and had need of 
all the rifles he could command. As in the case of 
Reno on the Little Big Horn he could do nothing but 
fight his own battle where he stood. 


62 


Boys* Own Book of ^Adventurers 

In the meantime Wilson and his men were making 
their despairing last stand. They shot their horses 
and fought from behind their bodies as breastworks. 
The Matabeles swarmed around and the white men 
took deadly toll before they died. When it was over, 
no white men were left alive, but Lo Bengula had paid 
for his victory with eighty men of royal blood and five 
hundred warriors. The white men sang their national 
anthem as they fought. The natives said afterwards 
that the last to die was their leader, Wilson. With 
both arms broken he came out from behind the bar¬ 
ricade of dead horses and walked toward the natives. 
A young warrior stabbed him with a spear, leaving it 
in his body. Wilson still walked toward him, the war¬ 
rior ran and shouted, “This man is bewitched: he can¬ 
not be killed,” and Wilson fell forward dead. 

This was almost the last burst of the first Matabele 
war, but there was plenty of fighting for Burnham and 
his kind. In the interval between the first and the 
second campaigns he led ten whites and seventy Kaffirs 
to explore Barotseland. Latea, the son of the native 
king, refused to honor the safe conduct granted by 
Leweaiki, his father, and surrounded the white men’s 
camp with his warriors, expecting to attack at day¬ 
break. In the middle of the night Burnham took a 
missionary interpreter and three companions and broke 
into Latea’s hut. Placing the muzzle of his rifle at 
the king’s head he demanded “Peace or war? You 
can kill us but you will die first.” The answer was 
peace. He then traveled north toward the Congo 
Basin. This was a momentous expedition and resulted 


63 


The Last of the Scouts 

in the discovery of valuable coal fields, large deposits 
of copper, a feasible route for the railroad, and a good 
point for the rails to cross the great Zambezi. It 
enabled Rhodes to proceed with speed in his gigantic 
task of spreading civilization in Africa. 

This expedition was started by Burnham’s observing 
that a copper bracelet worn by a slave was not made of 
trade copper but beaten out of native copper from 
their own mines. It led to a search covering two thou¬ 
sand miles with a successful conclusion. For special 
services in the campaign Burnham and his two com¬ 
panions, Maurice Gifford and Ingram, were given by 
the government a grant of three hundred square miles 
of land in northern Rhodesia. 

Burnham explored many of the great ruins and 
ancient cities of Rhodesia, and discovered a treasure of 
gold, both crucible and in ornaments, which proved 
that the native tales gathered by Sir Rider Haggard, 
when a young man in Africa, had a basis of truth. 
Haggard wove these tales into his romances, but the 
truth goes beyond them. Thousands of ancient work¬ 
ings were found, and Rhodesia still produces many mil¬ 
lions of dollars per annum in gold from this land of 
King Solomon’s Mines. 

It was on this journey that he suffered a week’s 
journey across the dry bed of an ancient lake. The 
only water for the expedition was carried in goat skin 
bags. The lazy Kaffir boys emptied the bags when 
the leader’s back was turned. There followed days 
of heat and burning thirst, and fifteen of the boys paid 
for their laziness with their lives. 


64 


Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

War was never long absent from South Africa In 
those days. Following the capture of Dr. Jameson in 
the ill-starred raid that was designed to break the 
power of the Boers in the Transvaal, muttering arose 
again among the Matabeles. Peace was not to their 
liking under the best of circumstances, and this looked 
like a good chance to break the power of the white 
men. The English had been beaten by the Dutch and 
the latter were far away. 

The leader, or inspirer, of the rebellion was a priest 
called the M’Limo. This was a title, not a name. 
He had his quarters in a cave in the side of a high 
kopje in the Matoppo Hills. Here he made incanta¬ 
tion and prepared “medicine” that was to make the 
whites powerless before the warriors of his people. 
It has been claimed that a literal translation of the 
word M’Limo is “Mouthpiece of God.” At any rate 
he claimed that honor and through an echo in the cave 
where he stayed convinced the people that he spoke 
truly. He promised to turn the bullets of the white 
men to water and that Lo Bengula should come back 
from his grave and sit once more on his throne In the 
Government House that Rhodes had built on the site 
of the old savage palace In Buluwayo. If this man 
could be taken or killed, the mainspring of the rebel¬ 
lion would be broken. Armstrong, a young man of 
twenty-two, a native of South Africa, and familiar 
with the Zulu tongue, had discovered the location of 
the M’LImo’s cave, and General Carrington accepted 
the services of Burnham to try to get him. The ap¬ 
proach to the cave was a triumph of Indian skill and 


65 


The Last of the Scouts 

woodcraft. Two thousand armed natives were in the 
village at the foot of the kopje. The white men hid 
their horses and crawled up a mile an hour. The last 
mile consumed three hours. The final climb to the 
cave was on hands and knees. The men carried brush 
in front of them to conceal their approach. 

Perhaps Major Burnham’s report to Earl Grey, 
Administrator of Rhodesia, at Buluwayo, will best 
describe the experience. It is a plain tale of hair-rais¬ 
ing experience, and the more impressive because of its 
plainness. 

“Sir—I have the honor to report that upon the 
information obtained by Native Commissioner Arm¬ 
strong, and laid before me here, we believed it possible 
to get into the Matoppo, and get the M’Limo in his 
cave. It was found there was to be a big Indaba (cere¬ 
mony) about the full of the moon, and almost with 
certainty he would be there sometime previous. 

“After several attempts that were failures, on the 
23 rd of the month we succeeded in catching the 
M’Limo in the act of going through his incantations 
in the cave. Our orders from General Carrington 
were to capture him if possible, but on no account to 
allow him to escape us. We were surrounded by Kaf¬ 
firs in all directions. The ground is very rough—huge 
granite boulders and kopjes and dongas (gullies). We 
hid our horses as near the cave as it was possible, and 
with great difficulty got ourselves into the cave. 

“The M’Limo was going through a preparatory 
Indaba this day, and the old men and women were 
carrying native beer and utensils for the big Indaba 


66 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

to come off on the following day. The Impi (regi¬ 
ment) was supposed to be behind the big granite hill. 
Just as the M’Limo had finished his dances in the 
smaller crevices and pathway leading to the main en¬ 
trance and was starting into the main cavern, I shot 
him with a Lee-Metford rifle, killing him instantly. 
We left his body at the entrance to the big cave. He 
is a man sixty years old with short cropped hair. He 
was not dressed with any snake-skins, charms or any 
of the ordinary equipment of the witch doctor. He 
is not a Ringkop (those wearing the hair shaved in a 
ring indicating the veteran Zulu warrior) ; he is a 
Makalaka. His features are rather aquiline for a 
negro; very wide between the eyes. His skin is more 
red than black. 

“Immediately after killing him we rushed down the 
side of the mountain. Just at the foot there is a large 
kraal of over one hundred huts, built of woven grass, 
Zulu style, no dagga (sticky mud) being used. The 
huts are conical with low doors, and were used as tem¬ 
porary resting places by people coming to hold Indabas 
with the M’Limo. We fired these huts. The wind 
blowing strongly against the kopje carried a huge 
sheet of flame and volumes of smoke far over the top. 
The Kaffirs saw us and shouted as we got to our horses. 
For two hours we were hotly pursued and were nearly 
exhausted. Fortunately the Kaffirs abandoned the 
chase after we crossed the Shashani River. 

“We arrived at Mangwe at 6 :30 P. M. 

“I would say that all the trails leading to this cave 
have been worn and beaten down several inches in 


67 


The Last of the Scouts 

depth, showing that this was the great Konza (council 
place) for the whole country. The Kaffir information 
by which Mr. Armstrong was enabled to discover the 
movements of the M’Limo was obtained under strict 
bond of secrecy never to betray their names to the 
white government or anybody, as it would mean abso¬ 
lute and certain death to all of them. I do not know 
even any names myself, but as I heard the ceremonies 
with my own ears and saw the preparations of the 
M’Limo myself, I am convinced that the information 
given was absolutely correct, and that this was the 
principal M’Limo of the nation. We have informa¬ 
tion of two minor priests whom we may be able yet to 
capture, but they are of slight importance in compari¬ 
son with the head priest, who always practiced in this 
particular cave. 

“I have the honor to be. Sir, your obedient servant, 
F. R. Burnham.” 

The ending of the M’Limo meant also the ending 
of the war as Burnham and Armstrong had predicted. 
It also brought an end to the American’s first tour in 
South Africa. He halted for a brief time in California 
and then hit the prospector’s trail in Alaska. He was 
there, remote from telegraph or newspapers, when the 
Spanish-American war broke out. He came out as 
fast as the boat could bring him, but the first news he 
heard when he landed in Seattle was that Buckey 
O’Neal, who had sent him an invitation to join the 
Rough Riders, was killed and the short-lived war was 
over. Then he turned back to Alaska. 

Alaska is a long way from South Africa, but some- 


68 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

times a call carries far. The bad feeling that had been 
smoldering between the Boers and English for many 
years, flaming up at Majuba Hill and again in the 
Jameson Raid, now burst forth in the war that was to 
settle the issue for good and all. Lord Roberts was 
on his way to Capetown to take command of the Brit¬ 
ish forces when he learned from Sir Frederick Car¬ 
rington something of Burnham’s achievements in the 
Matabele wars. The scout had been a member of 
Carrington’s staff at the time of the killing of the 
M’Limo. A cable from Roberts reached Burnham at 
Skagway with two and a half hours to pack and catch 
the next boat back to the States. He caught it—and 
(here is the real marvel) Mrs. Burnham, a refined and 
gentle woman of great courage, caught it with him. 
She had been with her husband through the perils of 
his South African days, and two hours and a half was 
time enough for her to make ready for the long trip 
to England, where she stayed till the war was over. 

In South Africa, he became Robert’s chief of scouts. 
Before the war was over he had been inside the Boer 
lines a hundred times, had been captured twice, escap¬ 
ing each time, had reconnoitered the laager of Cronje, 
at that time the chief Boer leader in the western field 
and the conquerer of the British at Modder River. 

To describe all his exploits in full would take a vol¬ 
ume in itself. A few samples must suffice. It was 
just before the capture of Kroonstad by the British 
that Burnham was assigned by Lord Roberts to cut 
the Boer lines and blow up the railroad north of the 
town to prevent the carrying off of supplies by the 


69 


The Last of the Scouts 

retreating Boers. The force consisted of fifty cavalry- 
men, eight sappers (men of the engineer corps to 
handle the explosives), and himself. Major Hunter- 
Weston was in command. The cavalry was to create 
a diversion, under cover of which the sappers and their 
leader were to slip through the lines and make their 
way to the railroad. 

The correspondent of the London Standard a few 
days after described the opening scene of the little 
melodrama. “They came upon the picket several miles 
south of the Zand River, and charging with swords 
soon brought them to terms. The scene was dramatic 
enough for the Adelphi stage—the broad veldt, the 
bright moonlight, the surprised picket, the flashing 
sabers, and the horsemen wheeling around.” 

This part of the show was soon over. The cavalry 
drew off when they were once assured that the sappers 
were well on their way. But it wasn’t so easy after all. 
There were more pickets, and hours were spent in 
passing them. Finally, with half an hour of moonlight 
and an hour of darkness left, they arrived at the chosen 
spot on the railway line, and found the main body of 
the Boers bivouacked there. Opposite was a small 
pasture fenced with barbed wire, in which were hobbled 
horses and a party of Boers sleeping. All the time 
mounted men and wagons were passing, taking their 
place in the retreating columns. Burnham crawled up 
to the fence on hands and knees and cut the wires to 
let his comrades in with their horses. The problem of 
getting to the railway with the guncotton seemed 
impossible of solution. Two men were selected to 


70 


Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

make a try with the explosives while the others stayed 
in the pasture with the hobbled horses. A troop of 
three hundred mounted Boers rode by, and the com¬ 
mander, seeing something suspicious among the pas¬ 
tured horses, halted twenty yards away and challenged 
in the darkness. The waiting men lay flat on their 
horses’ necks and held their breath. The Boer leader 
waited a moment for a reply, and then apparently con¬ 
cluded that the horses were riderless and rode on. 

In the meantime the two men had not succeeded in 
getting through with their precious but dangerous gun¬ 
cotton. There was a brief whispered conference, and 
it was decided to leave the horses in the pasture and 
crawl through the line. On the way they ran against 
three Boers. Hunter-Weston and Lieut. Childs put 
pistols to the heads of two of them and Burnham 
clapped his hand over the mouth of the third. It was 
touch and go, but they handed the prisoners over to 
the other men of the party to guard. Hunter-Weston 
and Burnham now took the guncotton and continued 
their crawl toward the railway. There were wagons 
and mounted infantry to pass, and with great difficulty 
the charges were finally placed and lighted. 

With the flare and blast of the explosion came wild 
confusion among the Boers, and under cover of it 
Hunter-Weston and Burnham regained their horses 
and retired toward the British lines with the sappers 
and their prisoners. On the way they ran into another 
picket, disarmed them, and took four more prisoners. 
The chase was of short duration. The Boers were 
retreating and had no stomach for a long run in the 


I 


71 


The Last of the Scouts 

direction in which their prey was heading, but before 
the little force made their way back to the British lines 
they had ridden fifty-six miles In enemy country and 
had been fifteen hours In the saddle. They had cut 
the telegraph line, blown up the railway, and taken 
seven prisoners with only one man wounded on their 
side. 

One of his early exploits led to his capture by the 
Boers under circumstances that were extraordinarily 
thrilling. It was late in March, 1900, that he was 
sent out from Bloemfontein by Lord Roberts to scout 
up to the Basuto border and ascertain the number of 
Boers In that region and find out. If possible, what they 
were planning. This time he traveled alone, on horse¬ 
back, with a led horse. He was delayed at the outset 
by the led horse breaking away and daylight found him 
near the British camp under Gen. Broadwood at Koorn 
Spruit. To his surprise he found the Spruit full of 
Boers and more arriving steadily. Evidently he had 
stumbled into an ambush being prepared for the men 
in the British camp. Being dressed much as were the 
men in the Boer commandoes, he tried at first to ride 
away casually, attempting at the same time to attract 
the attention of the British by signalling with a red 
handkerchief. They were too busy breaking camp and 
getting away to give heed to a footless handkerchief 
fluttering In the wind. But the Boers were not so 
Indifferent, and in a few moments he was a prisoner. 
His horses were too tired for him to attempt a dash, 
and he was soon an inmate of a stone cattle kraal 
under guard. 


72 


Boys^ Ozvn Book of Adventurers 

Boer riflemen shared the enclosure with him and 
kept one eye on him and one on the British camp in 
plain view through the loopholes. The action began 
when the English wagon train and artillery started 
forward without guard to cover them. Now the Boers 
were firing fast and accurately. For a time it looked 
as though the entire force would be wiped out without 
a chance to defend themselves. More Boers were 
riding up constantly and joining in the attack and the 
horses of the wagon train were in wild confusion. 

A colonial troop made a desperate attack to dislodge 
the Boers. There was not a fighting chance. Burn¬ 
ham’s only thought was that no living thing could es¬ 
cape the whirlwind of bullets. But the confusion 
extended no farther than the horses. The men under 
fire were cool. The famous Q and U batteries now 
unlimbered and went into action, although men and 
horses were dropping all about. It was never known 
who gave the order for this, but he earned his decora¬ 
tion that day, whoever he was. 

Burnham lay in his cattle kraal and watched the 
gunners serve their guns as coolly and steadily as 
though on parade. When the fire was at its hottest 
men crawled on hands and knees from guns to limbers 
and back again in order to avoid exposing themselves 
to bullets. Although the Boer fire was extremely fast, 
it was accurate and at carefully judged ranges. One 
man would get the distance by watching the dust puffs 
through glasses where his bullets struck on the open 
plain, and then would pass the word along to his fel¬ 
lows. The artillery saved the day for the British by 


73 


The Last of the Scouts 

the sacrifice of guns and gun crews. Major Burnham 
said, “Had it not been for those terrible cannon, the 
Boers told me they would have charged, closing in on 
all sides of Broadwood’s men.” 

When the British artillery swung into action the 
rifle fire soon slackened and the Boers began to draw 
off. The chance of an ambush and a complete routing 
or capture of the rooineks (rednecks: English) had 
been lost. Nevertheless, they had Burnham and four 
hundred and twenty other prisoners, besides army 
stores and wagon trains, and for these now began a 
long trek to the rear. The American had represented 
himself as a British officer engaged in map making, 
and although one of his captors charged him with 
being Burnham, the American scout, he failed to con¬ 
vince De Wet, the commandant. Burnham had seized 
the opportunity to wrap a handkerchief around his 
knee, pretending to be wounded. This earned him a 
ride in an ox-wagon with other wounded and gave him 
his only chance to escape, as the Boers were very 
vigilant. It was a hard trek of over forty miles back 
from Koorn Spruit, but he studied the route closely 
and kept it clearly in his mind. His pretended wound 
gave him a chance to talk with some of the captured 
British, and he told them he intended to escape and 
offered to take back any messages they might give him. 

Early in the morning of the third day of travel his 
chance came. A little Bushman was guarding him and 
mounted Boers rode behind. The wagons stopped 
shortlv before daylight, and the Bushman walked 
forward for a moment to speak to the driver of the 


74 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

oxen. Burnham dropped on the pole of the wagon 
(dissle-boom in Cape Dutch) and rolled to the ground 
between the oxen. When they started forward the 
wagon passed over him, and he rolled quickly to the 
side of the road as the rear wheels rolled by. It was 
quick work, for the horses of the mounted guard 
following close behind nearly trod on him in the 
darkness. 

There were about twenty minutes of darkness left, 
and he ran to a Kaffir kraal and asked the native to 
get him a horse. The Kaffir promised, but after he 
had gone the scout became suspicious and ran out into 
the open veldt and hid by lying flat in a shallow depres¬ 
sion, covering his face with his hat. It was tricks like 
this that he had learned from the Apaches, past mas¬ 
ters in the art of concealment where concealment seems 
impossible. The Boers soon missed him and hunted 
in every direction but to no purpose. For twelve hours 
he lay without stirring, tortured by heat, thirst, and 
insects. When dark came he found water in a shallow 
spruit and set out on the back trail on foot and without 
food. Weak from fasting, Burnham made slow prog¬ 
ress, and was obliged to lie out in the open veldt for 
another long day. On the morning of the next day he 
reached Broadwood’s camp and reported. In the five 
days and nights of absence from the British lines his 
food consisted of one biscuit and one small mealie. 

The war dragged on and the British captured Pre¬ 
toria. It was necessary to cut the railway lines between 
that city and Delagoa Bay in Portugese East Africa 
to prevent the bringing in of supplies to the Boers from 


75 


The Last of the Scouts 

that side, also to prevent them moving two thousand 
British prisoners into the fever swamps of the low 
country. This was another single-handed job, and 
again Burnham found the Boers in force at the very 
point that he must set the explosive. He was fired 
on, and threw himself alongside his horse Indian 
fashion to escape the bullets. The horse was shot and 
fell, pinning the rider to the ground, where he lay 
unconscious for hours, pinned down by the dead body 
of his horse. When he came back to life he gave no 
thought to safety till he had crawled to the bridge and 
set the explosive that cut the line. Then he crawled 
to an empty kraal and lay hidden for twenty-four hours 
while the Boers searched for him. This was the end 
of his active career in the Transvaal. When he was 
found by the British he was nearly dead through the 
breaking of a blood vessel in his stomach. Only the 
long time since his last meal saved him. 

Lord Roberts gave to this quiet, little blue-eyed 
American the proudest certificate of character and 
achievement any man could ask when he wrote him: 
“I doubt if any other man in the force could have suc¬ 
cessfully carried out the thrilling enterprises in which 
from time to time you have been engaged, demanding 
as they did the training of a lifetime combined with 
exceptional courage, caution, and powers of endur¬ 
ance.” And with this letter should be joined the cross 
of the Distinguished Service Order and the South 
African Medal with many bars which the British Gov¬ 
ernment gave him. He could have had the Victoria 


16 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

Cross, but it involved the surrender of his American 
citizenship, and that was not to be considered. 

In such a brief space only the high spots of his career 
can be illuminated. There is another chapter in his 
exploits in the Ashantee War on the West Coast of 
Africa. In this fever land where in the old days the 
average life of the white man was ninety days, he 
served through the campaign without a touch of illness. 
All through his long career in the Tropics he carried 
this same immunity. At Bloemfontein he saw eleven 
hundred men of the Guards Brigades dead of enteric 
buried in a single trench. He traveled days on end 
in a land where the sleeping sickness struck like shells 
in a besieged town. He camped in fever-smitten 
swamps around Tanganyika and came out unscathed. 
He was two years in the country at the head of the 
Nile, mapping, exploring, and studying. At one time 
he came in conflict with a German officer, and before 
the argument was over the American’s gun was against 
the German’s stomach and the German flag was on its 
way to the ground. There were diplomatic inquiries 
and investigations, but so far as officialdom was con¬ 
cerned, Burnham’s expedition never existed, so such a 
distressing incident never could have taken place. 

There is no space either to speak of Mexico, al¬ 
though it is in that country that Major Burnham’s 
present interests and activities lie. In all his apparent 
wanderings there has always been a deeper reason than 
the mere love of fighting. His scouting of Zulu and 
Boer was only an incident to a larger scouting that 
had for its reason minerals or railroad routes or town 


77 


The Last of the Scouts 

sites or farming lands or grazing grounds. He is one 
of the avant-couriers of civilization, and in Mexico he 
is still breaking trail for generations that are to come. 
When America entered the World War, Major Burn¬ 
ham was one of the eighteen officers selected by Col. 
Roosevelt to go with him to France in the division he 
proposed to raise. 

I asked him once the prime requisites of the success¬ 
ful scout. He ran over a long list and then he said, 
“But the most important of all is patience, and more 
patience; and then patience again. And the hardest 
thing of all is to fail and come in and admit failure and 
then go back and try again.” 

And that, in little more than outline, is the story of 
Frederick Russell Burnham, no movie hero, but a 
simple American, born of the American soil and com¬ 
ing back to it from his adventures in distant places to 
settle down to the routine of working for a living. 


IV 


McGIFFIN OF THE YALU 

This is not the first time we in the United States 
have cut down the size of our navy. Forty years ago 
we found ourselves still bearing the burden^ left by a 
great war and hoping, as we hope now, that we had 
done our last fighting. Congress decided to build no 
more ships and to cut to the lowest possible limit the 
force on those already in commission. The result was 
that the class of 1882 at the Naval Academy found 
itself with a naval training but no navy. Only the first 
twelve found posts and commissions. 

Among the unlucky ones was a youngster named 
Philo Norton McGifiin. He was a son of Pennsyl¬ 
vania and a descendant of two fighting Highland clans, 
Clan MacGregor and Clan MacAlpine. His great 
grandfather had fought in the Revolution, other rela¬ 
tives in the War of 1812, his father in the Mexican 
and Civil Wars, but since his country had foresworn 
fighting for the future, there was no place for him in 
Uncle Sam’s navy. 

Even before he reached the Academy he had ac¬ 
quired a reputation as a man of action with ability to 
see the opportunity and courage to seize it. He entered 
in September, 1877. There were serious railroad 

78 


79 


McGiffin of the Yalu 

strikes that year, and the train on which McGiffin was 
traveling to Annapolis was attacked by strikers while 
passing through Pittsburgh and was run into the round¬ 
house for the protection of the passengers. The round¬ 
house was besieged by the strikers, and the people were 
suffering for lack of water. McGiffin, then a boy of 
fifteen or sixteen, took an engine and ran through the 
strikers, filled the water tank, and dashed back into 
the roundhouse. Many shots were fired at his engine, 
but he got through unmarked. For this feat he 
received the official thanks of the city of Pittsburgh. 

There is a tradition at the Academy that he stood 
no higher in his classes than was necessary to get 
through, but there is good evidence that he was active 
none the less. A pyramid of old round shot stood on 
the second floor of the building in which he lived. Late 
at night he rolled them down the stairs one at a time, 
carrying away the banisters, breaking the steps, and 
arousing most of the Academy. He was hardly out of 
the brig where this escapade sent him than he achieved 
fame again by firing a salute at midnight from an old 
Mexican war cannon that stood on the grounds. His 
nerve was undisputed. In those days the practice 
cruises were held on square-rigged sailing vessels. 
Midshipmen were allowed a certain amount of latitude 
when off duty and follow the leader was a favorite 
game on such occasions. Young McGiffin brought the 
game to an abrupt end when his turn came to be leader 
by dropping overboard from the main yardarm while 
the ship was under full sail. There were no followers. 

At one time during his career in the Academy a 


80 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

meeting of the class was held to discuss the disciplining 
of one of the members who had violated some ethical 
rule of the cadets. In the midst of the argument a 
young Japanese named Uriu, a midshipman by inter¬ 
national courtesy, proposed a course of action that was 
immediately followed. After the vote McGiffen rose 
and made his contribution: “There is only one Chris¬ 
tian in this class,” he said, “and that is that damned 
heathen Uriu.” Uriu is now an Admiral in the Jap¬ 
anese navy, a Baron of the Empire, and a member of 
the House of Peers, but, as he told a fellow-classmate 
in 1922, he still remembers this remark as one of the 
greatest compliments ever paid him. 

When Uncle Sam graduated McGiffin with a thou¬ 
sand dollars in lieu of a commission he was left at 
loose ends. Family tradition, blood, training, and his 
own desire all combined to urge him into the great 
game of war, but wars were few in those simple days. 
The nearest one was the other side of the world. Out 
in China the Chinese were dragging along a mild affair 
with the French which history vaguely remembers 
under the name of the Tongking War. It was a poor 
war, but it was the best that McGiffin could see, and 
he decided to offer his services to the Chinese. He 
sailed from San Francisco early in 1885 and reached 
China just in time to learn that the war had about 
worn itself out. French gunboats gave him and his 
fellow passengers a small thrill by chasing their boat 
on the way from Nagasaki to Shanghai. Through the 
American consul at Tientsin he secured an interview 
with Li Hung Chang, then and for many years after 


81 


McGiffin of the Yalu 

the power in China. There is a story that the sentry 
at the gate of Li’s compound attempted to stop the 
young American. Finding that his letter of introduc¬ 
tion did not impress the guard and not willing to wait 
for the slow process of complaint and recommenda¬ 
tion, he cleared the road by throwing the sentry into 
the muddy moat around the outer wall and marched 
in triumphantly. 

But his troubles were not yet over. Li Hung Chang 
put him on the witness stand in characteristic fashion, 
as McGiffin reported in a letter to his mother. 

“Why did you come to China?” 

“To enter the Chinese service for the war.” 

“How do you expect to enter?” 

“I expect you to give me a commission.” 

“I have no place to offer you.” 

“I think you have. I have come all the way from 
America to get it.” 

“What would you like?” 

“I would like to get the new torpedo boat and go 
down the Yangtze-Kiang to the blockading squadron.” 

“Will you do that?” 

“Of course.” 

The Viceroy seemed impressed by the quick, confi¬ 
dent answers of the American, but he knew that the 
war was over and he was looking to the future. Per¬ 
haps there was room on the plan for this lad, but he 
must prove himself first. China sets great store by 
age and experience. There is no place in her category 
for bright young men. McGiffin writes: “He asked, 
‘How old are you?’ When I told him I was twenty- 


82 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

four I thought he would faint—for in China a man 
is a boy until he is over thirty. He said I would never 
do—I was a child.” 

Having thus taught the youngster his place and a 
becoming reverence in the presence of his elders, Li 
spoke casually of a possible post in the Naval College 
and Arsenal at Tientsin. But of course they would 
never grant a post of such importance to a child unless 
he was an exceptional child. China is the land of 
examinations. They understand the gentle art of quiz¬ 
zing as does no other nation on earth. These are the 
subjects that they set before McGiffin: seamanship, 
gunnery, navigation, nautical astronomy, geometry, 
algebra, trigonometry, conic sections, curve tracing, 
differential and integral calculus. Fresh from Annap¬ 
olis, he passed high and received the title of Professor 
of Seamanship and Gunnery. In addition, he was to 
teach navigation and fencing and to drill the cadets 
in infantry and artillery tactics. For this he was to 
receive a hundred taels ($150) a month and a house. 
McGiffin’s Scotch blood had prompted him to ask for 
a hundred and thirty taels, but the Chinese are a 
match for the Scotch in thrift. He has no years, said 
Li, and he may be an impostor. So he discounted the 
new Professor thirty taels a month for insurance. 

The ten years that followed are easily bridged. The 
adventure that was to be McGiffin’s was to be com¬ 
passed in a few short hours—five, in fact—hours of 
battle smoke and the roar of great guns, when the air 
rocked with gun fire and the sea was lashed with shell. 
And the preparation for that brief moment of high 


McGiffin of the Yalu 83 

adventure was ten years of placid work at Tientsin. 
There is little enough record of that time. He taught 
the subjects assigned him, and he took the new cruisers 
out on their trial trips. Being what he was, he worked 
faithfully to help China build a navy, but his eyes were 
always on his native country. There were rumors now 
and again that Congress might be moved to reinstate 
the midshipmen who had been turned loose, and Mc¬ 
Giffin wrote frequent letters of “our Bill” as he called 
it. It was a vain hope. Politicians are slow to com¬ 
pensate for a wrong, especially one done in the sacred 
name of economy, and America was not yet ready 
to begin the building of a great navy. In those days 
China outranked us as a naval power. 

At the end of his ten years he applied for leave to 
go home and was making his preparations to start 
when the big call came. China declared war on Japan, 
and he withdrew his application for leave before the 
Chinese government had time to suggest it. China had 
need of him now, and there was a call to which his 
fighting spirit responded. He was attached to the 
fleet of Admiral Ting Yu Chang as second in command 
with the 7,000-ton battleship Chen Yuen. The fleet 
was gathered at Ta-Lien-Wan, the chief Chinese port 
near Dalny, where the Russians later erected the great 
fortress of Port Arthur. 

It was one o’clock on the morning of September 
16, 1894, that eleven warships, four gunboats, and six 
torpedo boats cleared from Ta-Lien-Wan to convoy 
a fleet of troopships to the mouth of the Yalu. The 
exact whereabouts of the Japanese fleet was apparently 


84 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

not known, and no great effort had been made to find 
them. Late in July two Chinese ships, the Kwang Yih 
and Kow Shing^ had run foul of a Japanese force off 
Baker Island and had been sunk. Following this dis¬ 
aster the Chinese government had ordered Admiral 
Ting not to cruise eastward of a line drawn from the 
Shantung lighthouse to the mouth of the Yalu. The 
Yalu, it should be said, is the river that forms the 
northern boundary of Korea, between that country and 
Manchuria. The fighters in the navy chafed at this 
order but obeyed it. If there was to be a fight, appar¬ 
ently the Japanese must bring it to them. 

The convoy reached the mouth of the Yalu safely, 
and the troopships crossed the bar and proceeded up 
the river to their anchorage. This was early on the 
morning of the seventeenth. The warships went to 
quarters and battle practice was held as usual with no 
thought of the nearness of action. The morning was 
spent and the midday meal was being prepared when 
the lookout on the Chen Yuen reported smoke on the 
horizon. The other ships had sighted it at almost 
the same instant and the bugles sounded “Action” and 
“Officers’ Call” through the fleet. The moment to 
avenge Baker Island was at hand. 

It was a grim sight on board as those two modern 
fighting fleets drew rapidly near each other. On the 
Chinese ships the gun shields on the big Krupps had 
been cut away after the fight off Baker Island because 
of the danger of shell bursts being confined within 
them and disabling the whole gun crew as had hap¬ 
pened in the previous fight. Sand bags and bags filled 


McGiffin of the Yalu 85 

with coal from the engine room bunkers were piled 
along inside the superstructure to cut off some of the 
small arms fire, and hammocks were slung around the 
rapid-fire guns for the same purpose. The decks were 
sanded to prevent their becoming slippery with blood 
as had been the custom in the hand-to-hand fights of 
the old wooden ships. Extra shells and solid shot were 
laid ready near the guns to save time at the ammunition 
hoists. So the Chinese stood out to meet the enemy 
with black smoke pouring from the funnels, bearing 
evidence of the forced draft below where the sweating 
stokers were feeding the fires. The real heroes of the 
modern battleship are the stokers. They see none of 
the action, feel none of the thrill. Disaster that comes 
swift and complete finds them helpless, trapped a score 
or more feet below the water line. 

This was the first real test of modern battleships in 
action. Ironclads had been used in our Civil War, but 
they were freak ships, most of them adapted from 
wooden ships hastily armored with whatever might be 
found. The little Monitor that beat the Confederate 
ram Merrimac at Hampton Roads was described as 
a cheesebox on a raft, and the Merrimac was an old 
Union boat that had been sunk by Confederate bat¬ 
teries and afterwards raised and sheathed with railroad 
iron. 

Here off the Yalu the highest product of the steel 
ship builder’s art was going into action for the first 
time armed with modern, long range, big guns—the 
Japanese with Canet guns from France, the Chinese 
with German Krupps. Both nations were making their 


86 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

supreme throw with fate in this battle. If the Japa¬ 
nese lost, their little army in Korea would be cut off 
and helpless against the Chinese force already on its 
way. The Chinese were gambling their naval future. 
Defeat now meant the end of that road for many years 
to come, and the death of the dreams that Li Hung 
Chang had cherished of naval supremacy in the eastern 
Pacific and a place among the fighting powers of the 
world that should free them forever from foreign 
domination. The echoes of the Yalu fight are still to 
be heard. 

Much was made after the fight of the lack of prepa¬ 
ration of the Chinese. McGiffin’s own words are the 
best evidence on this point. He wrote: “For weeks 
we had anticipated an engagement and had had daily 
exercises at general quarters, etc., and little remained 
to be done. There were woeful defects in our ammu¬ 
nition supplies, as will be seen, but had we kept the 
seas for a year longer before fighting, there would have 
been no improvement in that respect, since the respon¬ 
sibility for the neglect lay in Tientsin. So the fleet 
went into action as well prepared as it was humanly 
possible for it to be with the same officers and men, 
handicapped as they were by official corruption and 
treachery ashore.” 

The Chinese advanced to the battle in an irregular 
line, two of the older ships being unable to keep the 
pace. On paper the two fleets were about equal. The 
Chinese were superior in big guns, but the Japanese 
had the edge in quick-firers. The Japanese outnum¬ 
bered the Chinese, twelve to ten. The Chinese gun- 


McGiffin of the Yalu 87 

boats and torpedo boats failed to get into the main 
action at all. 

The commander of the Japanese flagship, the Mat¬ 
sushima, was Tasuker Serata, a close friend and class¬ 
mate of McGiffin at Annapolis. 

The first shot was fired by the Chinese flagship at 
about five thousand yards, and the rest of the fleet 
joined, the Japanese withholding their fire for at least 
five minutes, closing in fast all the time. As the range 
shortened both sides began to score hits, and the sur¬ 
face of the sea burst into geysers where shell and solid 
shot struck. The officers on the bridge of the Chen 
Yuen, thirty feet above the waterline, were showered 
with spray, and the men at the guns were stung with 
the flying bursts like rain before a gale. 

Soon after the action began one Chinese ship, the 
Tsi Yuen, turned tail and ran. Late that night she 
reached Ta-Lien-Wan, and the captain reported that 
his comrades had been wiped out by a great Japanese 
armada. Another soon followed suit. The captain 
of the latter evidently had a knowledge of navigation 
about equal to his courage, for in the early morning 
he landed on a reef outside the harbor mouth at Ta- 
Lien-Wan. Now the odds were eight to twelve, and 
the Japanese drew in closer. Two Chinese ships burst 
into flames and headed for the beach. From this time 
on the major Japanese ships practically ignored all 
except the Chinese flagship and her sister ship, the 
Chen Yuen, conned by McGiffin. 

There was no plan of battle left for the Chinese, 
but those two floating targets drew together and stood 


88 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

off the attack of the five Japanese that were pouring 
shot and shell into them at close range. Around and 
around them the Japanese steamed, but they could not 
break them apart, and again and again the Chen Yuen 
covered the flagship and saved her from destruction. 
It was now six against twelve, with only two of the 
six counting in the fight. McGiffin’s ship was on fire 
repeatedly and only the fact that the hose was laid and 
the water turned on before the beginning of the fight 
saved her from utter ruin. For the last two hours of 
the fight the American was practically blinded from 
smoke and the concussion of the guns and the shell 
explosions, his eyes being so congested with blood that 
they were nearly closed. His Chinese second in com¬ 
mand conned the ship and carried out his captain’s 
orders to the letter. Through all the turmoil of the 
engagement, with modern ships fighting with twelve- 
inch guns at a range sometimes as short as seventeen 
hundred yards—which might be likened to a pistol duel 
at ten paces—he still had the ability to observe the 
effect of the Japanese gun fire and to note down in¬ 
stances for future reference. Of the “broadside firing 
by director,” i.e., the firing of the whole battery by a 
single electrical contact, he says: 

“This system was most effective, the result of so 
many shots striking at once, and producing numerous 
fires, being very annoying.” This seems a mild enough 
statement from the commander whose ship was the 
target of this interesting experiment. 

There was more than one hero at the Yalu fight. 
The Chih Yuen bore down on the Japanese line. She 


89 


McGiffin of the Yalu 

was hit by a big shell and started to sink by the head. 
The Chinese captain ordered full speed ahead in a 
last attempt to ram. Her wound was too great and 
she dove under in her dying charge with the black 
smoke of the forced draft pouring from her funnels. 

The end of the engagement was approaching. The 
two big Chinese ships would not yield as long as they 
were afloat. McGiffin had in his magazine some steel 
shell which he regarded as of an experimental type. 
As well as his bloodshot eyes would permit, he directed 
the loading of one of the guns in the forward turret. 
At that moment Serata swung the Matsushima out of 
column and fired one shot at the Chen Yuen at the 
instant that McGiffin fired his “experimental” shot. 
Both shots landed and both ships were raked almost 
fore and aft. McGiffin and Serata were both wounded, 
and Serata afterwards died from his wounds. Firing 
ceased gradually, and the Japanese drew off. Ammuni¬ 
tion was low in the Chinese magazines, but the two 
ships followed, firing at intervals. Then the Japanese 
turned and poured in the hottest fire of the afternoon. 
It was the last burst. The Japanese had done their 
work, but night was coming on and there was always 
the danger of a torpedo attack in the darkness. The 
Chinese could not continue if they would. The six- 
inch shells were gone, and the Chen Yuen had only 
twenty-five solid steel shot for the twelve-inch guns. 
A half-hour of slow fire would have seen the end. The 
military foretop had been silent for nearly an hour. 
A single shell had killed the whole gun crew. 

McGiffin and his admiral gathered together the frag- 


90 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

ments of their fleet, and shepherded them slowly back 
to Port Arthur. Six were still able to steam at slow 
speed, one of them on fire as she moved. The flames 
of one of the beached fighters shone across the sea, 
lighting them on their crippled way. 

It was the end of McGiffin’s adventure—and of 
China’s naval dream as well. The Orientals have small 
mercy for the loser. McGiflin’s tribute to his Admiral, 
Ting Yu Chang, is significant: 

“A gallant soldier and true gentleman. Betrayed 
by his countrymen, fighting against odds, almost his 
last official act was to stipulate for the lives of his 
officers and men. His own he scorned to save, well 
knowing that his ungrateful country would prove less 
merciful than his honorable foe.” 

The end of the drama for McGiffin was delayed for 
more than two years. Broken by the concussions of 
the heavy fire that his ship received, bearing wounds 
from shell splinters that would not heal, he came back 
at last to his own country and found a home in a New 
York hospital. Here in constant pain he wrote the 
story of the Yalu fight, the only account in existence 
by an eye witness. The code of the Chinese has no 
place for failure. Defeat demands the last full pen¬ 
alty. His admiral had already paid it with his own 
hand. His second in command at the Yalu had taken 
the same road at Wei-Hai-Wei as the Japanese con¬ 
querors came alongside to take over his ship. McGiffin 
had been too long in the East not to have imbibed much 
of the spirit that sent these men out. A revolver 


McGiffin of the Yalu 91 

hidden in a dispatch box brought to his bedside gave 
him the means, and the curtain was rung down. 

At any early day in our own navy he might have 
found a high and useful place. Had he lived a few 
years later he might have been of the breed of seadogs 
that the men at the guns idolize and the bureau chiefs 
at their desk fear and strive to restrain. As it was, 
he spent his ten years of active life under an alien flag 
and found the adventure that his spirit sought crowded 
into the five hours of a losing fight. 


V 


BURTON, THE PILGRIM ADVENTURER 

There are two kinds of explorers—those who seek 
for knowledge primarily and to whom adventure is an 
incident and often an annoyance, and those who go 
chiefly for the thrill of adventure and to look upon 
“the bright face of danger.” Richard Francis Burton 
stands at the head of the latter clan. 

One of the great linguists and a leading Orientalist 
of his time, a geographer and anthropologist of wide 
knowledge, a not indifferent naturalist, a student of 
religion and particularly of the strange and hidden all 
his life, he was always and primarily the adventurer. 
Lord Denby said of him that he had compressed into 
his life before middle age “more of study, more of 
hardship, and more of successful enterprise and adven¬ 
ture than would have sufficed to fill up the existence of 
half a dozen ordinary men.” 

He boasted often of the Gypsy strain in his blood, 
of which there is apparently no more evidence than was 
implied in his swarthy skin, dark, gleaming eyes, and 
wild reckless temper. His stock was ordinary good 
English, although his father was born in Ireland and 
was an officer in an Irish regiment. A small inheritance 
that enabled the family to wander at loose ends about 
Europe gave the young Richard full scope for his 

92 


The Pilgrim Adventurer 93 

spirit of adventure. In the case of both himself and 
his brother Edward this usually took the form of 
youthful scrapes. Meanwhile his father dabbled in 
amateur chemistry or consulted with his wife about 
good places for the ailments which they both imagined 
themselves to possess. The chemistry usually produced 
nothing worse than vile smells and mild explosions, 
while the imaginary ailments and the traveling from 
cure to cure that they demanded gave Richard a 
chance to become acquainted in his own way with a 
considerable part of France and Italy. This irregular 
wandering life did little to discipline a spirit naturally 
headstrong and impatient of control. 

His father vaguely intended him for the church. 
Meanwhile he roamed about Continental towns poking 
his nose into quarters usually known to tourists only 
by hearsay. He seems even then to have had rare 
facility in languages and was a skillful gambler, an 
accomplishment that afterwards stood him in good 
stead at Oxford. He was nineteen when he matricu¬ 
lated at Trinity College in 1840 and his first day there 
brought him into trouble. A fellow undergraduate 
made sneering comment on the sweeping military 
moustache which he wore and was promptly challenged 
to a duel. There is no record, however, of its having 
been fought. Burton heard of the cheerful practice of 
hazing Freshmen, not unknown in this country. He 
heated a poker and waited just inside his unlocked 
door. Word must have gone around of something 
explosive in this English gypsy. At any rate no hazers 


came. 


94 


Boys* Own Book of 'Adventurers 

There were two things for which Burton thanked 
Oxford, his first knowledge of Arabic and a bulldog of 
wondrous ugliness and pedigree. His career at the 
University came to an abrupt end when he went to the 
races without permission, and he appears next as a 
subaltern of the 18th Regiment of Bombay Native 
Infantry. Sir Charles Napier was then approaching 
the height of his fame, and he became young Burton’s 
hero. But he hated army life for all that and welcomed 
a chance to join the Sinde Survey. He was now in the 
full tide of his first rapture over Oriental languages 
and life, studying Persian, Arabic, Gujarati, Hindus¬ 
tani, Marathi. Disguised as a native he loafed about 
the bazaars, fooling even the natives themselves. 

Invalided home with a severe attack of ophthalmia, 
he landed in Italy and in spite of weak eyes applied 
himself to the preparation of books on Goa and Sinde 
and a manual of Bayonet Exercise. Through all his life 
Burton was an accomplished swordsman and horse¬ 
man, one of the best of his time, and in this period in 
Italy and later at Boulogne he probably owed the 
recovery of his health to his love of these sports. 

India had given him a taste of the real adventure, 
that was to hold him through his life, and his eyes now 
turned toward Mecca. Not only did that sacred city 
of Islam attract him but there was a great white spot 
on the map of Central Arabia that was a standing 
challenge to his restless nature. 

His departure was characteristic. At Boulogne he 
had met a Miss Arundell, ten years later to become 
Mrs. Burton. The path of his courtship was a stony 


The Pilgrim Adventurer 95 

one. The Arundells were proud of the fact that they 
were “old English Catholics,” while Burton’s religious 
beliefs were varied and subject to suspicion. He soon 
wearied of fruitless dangling and disappeared without 
warning or farewell. In due course there appeared at 
Cairo, Mirza Abdullah of Bushire, devout Moham¬ 
medan on pilgrimage to Mecca. 

This was his first great adventure and the one for 
which he is best known, but except for the sensational 
atmosphere in which it has been clothed it was far from 
being his greatest. Other white men had made the trip, 
and to one of Burton’s audacity and skill in Oriental 
tongues and customs the danger was not great. 

When at Cairo, Burton took on the name and dress 
of a Mohammedan, he laid aside the feelings of an 
Englishman and became a part of Islam. It was 
Ramazan, the month of fasting and prayer, and he 
fasted and prayed with the most devout. Meanwhile 
he cast about him for companions for the pilgrimage 
and presently made friends with Sa’ad the Demon and 
an Arab Sheikh Hamid. He also picked up for servant 
a shrewd rascal named Mahamined. Sa’ad and Ma- 
hamined were a good pair to tie to if the traveler was 
to have the best of the meager comforts available on 
the way. The boat on which they embarked for 
Yambu was built for 60 passengers and there were 90 
on board. An overload of 50% was nothing unusual 
for Mecca pilgrims. Such experiences were trifles in 
a land where hundreds died yearly of thirst and pes¬ 
tilence and shipwreck in their effort to earn the green 
turban that was the crown of Mohammedan desire. 


96 


Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

There are degrees of discomfort and Sa’ad and 
Mahamined found a place of vantage on the poop deck 
of the crowded vessel where they could at least lie 
down to sleep. They had wisely provided their com¬ 
panions with stout clubs and when a group of Magh- 
rabis, a wild desert tribe from near Tripoli, stormed 
their stronghold it was a case of clubs against knives. 
The attack ended abruptly when Mirza Abdullah of 
Bushire dropped a heavy water jug on the heads of 
the leaders. 

The trip to Mecca called for courage and resource¬ 
fulness, but only occasionally was there a threat of real 
danger. For double protection. Burton changed ser¬ 
vants after he landed, and assumed the dress and lan¬ 
guage of a Pathan from the Afghan border. Few of 
these wild tribesmen made the pilgrimage and the 
danger of detection was correspondingly small. 

At Mecca Burton allayed any suspicions that might 
have arisen by outdoing the most devout in his adora¬ 
tion of the Kaaba, the shrine that tradition said was 
built by Abraham and that contained the sacred black 
stone, the jewel sent from Heaven. In the midst of 
his genuflections around the sacred stone and his kissing 
of its well-worn surface he found time to observe it 
and to conclude that it was probably of meteoric origin. 
Here was the real point of danger. A white man 
found in the Kaaba would have had short shrift and 
no mercy. 

At the start of his trip Burton had had high hopes 
of writing his name on some of the blank spaces on 
the map of Central Arabia, some of which remain un- 


97 


The Pilgrim Adventurer 

explored to this day, but tribal wars had closed the way 
for even non-combatant Arabs, and Burton turned back 
to Jiddah on the Red Sea. Once there a Pathan pilgrim 
disappeared in the cabin of an English ship lying in 
harbor and an hour later an English gentleman 
emerged. 

The great trip was done, and the book that resulted 
was one of the best of Burton’s long list, but the jour¬ 
ney that was to come next was infinitely more hazard¬ 
ous. Somaliland, at the extreme eastern part of 
Africa, was closed territory, and no white man had 
seen the walls of Harar, its savage capital. That fact 
was inducement enough for Burton. The year after 
Mecca, 1854, saw him at Zeila, on the Gulf of Aden, 
this time as a Moslem merchant. He scorned the 
elaborate preparations and long trains of porters and 
guides and gun bearers that usually went with African 
travel. His entourage was frequently untrustworthy 
but always interesting. This time it consisted of a 
former native policeman at Aden nicknamed the Long 
Gulad, a rascally Moslem priest who went by the 
rather direful name The End of Time, and a petty 
Easa chieftain, whose task was the doubtful one of 
protecting Burton. Probably he served as well as any 
other since protecting Burton was an impossible assign¬ 
ment under the best of circumstances. 

It was late in the year when the little party started 
through the Isa country on a trip that held a menace 
from the beginning. “Traitorous as an Isa,” was a 
proverb at Zeila. But Burton was doubly armed. 
Bedouins attacked his little band of supposed Moslem 


98 Boys^ Own Book of "^Adventurers 

traders. At the first report of Burton’s revolver they 
drew off and sent a messenger to explain that it was 
all a joke. Then Burton flashed his magic star sap¬ 
phire and threatened them with “sorcery, death and 
wild beasts.” This is the first appearance of this useful 
stone in the Burton armory, and the traveler seems at 
times to have had almost as firm a belief in its magic 
properties as did the natives who cringed before it. 

At Sagharrah fever gained him the friendship of 
Jirad Adan, a chief of intelligence and power. But 
Jirad would not go to Harar. “No one,” he said, “is 
safe in the Amir’s clutches, and I would as soon walk 
into a crocodile’s mouth as set foot in that city.” 

As the travelers left Sagharrah the villagers con¬ 
soled them by reciting the Fatihah, the first chapter of 
the Koran. Audacious courage carries its own charms, 
and they won through to Harar, “a dark speck upon 
a tawny sheet of stubble.” Questioned at the gate, 
Burton arrogantly demanded to be taken at once be¬ 
fore the Amir. At the palace he swaggered into the 
royal presence between two long lines of Galla spear¬ 
men, his hand on a revolver hidden in the broad sash 
at his waist. He had determined, so he said after¬ 
wards, to shoot the Amir if one of the spearmen lifted 
his weapon. It was a characteristic boast, and prob¬ 
ably an afterthought. 

There was little to see at Harar, although the ten 
days he spent there held a deadly menace each hour 
of every day. It was a pestilential spot sunk in filth, 
sloth, and unspeakable vice, a festering sore in a thirsty 
land. Even Burton, student of the weird and the deca- 


99 


The Pilgrim Adventurer 

dent, found little here to interest him, and soon sent 
the rest of his party back to Zeila while he made for 
Berbera, on the coast three hundred miles to the north¬ 
east, to join Speke, Horne, and Stroyan. Speke had 
already won prominence as an explorer on the Upper 
Nile, and Burton was hungry to join him in a search 
for the source of that river, the fabled fountains of 
which Herodotus had written. 

His track led him straight through a desert land, 
where he nearly died of thirst till the flight of a sand- 
grouse into a line of low hills brought him to water. 

The four men made their way to Aden, running the 
gauntlet of Somali spears all the way to the coast. 
Their first try for the Upper Waters of the Nile came 
to an abrupt end at Berbera. Just as they were ready 
to take the trail, they were attacked by 300 natives. 
The colored guards ran at the first shock and the four 
Englishmen were left to fight it out. Stroyan died with 
a spear through his body. Burton had a javelin 
through both cheeks, knocking out four teeth and 
marking him for life. Speke drew eleven wounds, 
but the three of them fought their way through to the 
beach and safety on a native boat bearing Stroyan’s 
body with them. 

The Crimean war interrupted the Nile plans, al¬ 
though Burton got no nearer active service than Con¬ 
stantinople. This was the period of his greatest 
unpopularity in England. Many canards about him 
were afloat, some of them probably starting from 
boasting or reckless statements by himself. In bursts 
of resentment or ill temper or in the mere freakish 


100 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

desire to shock the respectables at home he had done 
not a little to draw a picture of himself that conven¬ 
tional Englishmen were bound to abhor. In his writ¬ 
ings there were many references in text or notes to 
native habits and practices that shocked and repelled. 
The conclusion was inevitable. He knows these things 
and writes of them openly and without shame or apol¬ 
ogy. He must himself condone if not practice them. 
It was many years before he lived down this ill-earned 
reputation. 

In the meantime, whatever his popular standing, he 
was forcing respect for his courage as an explorer. 
His expedition to the source of the Nile that followed 
hard upon the settlement of the Crimean War was 
financed by the Royal Geographical Society, the most 
conservative of English scientific bodies. His creden¬ 
tials were curiously varied. In addition to the backing 
of the R. G. S., he carried letters from the Sultan of 
Zanzibar, a diploma from Sheikh El Islam at Mecca, 
and a passport from Cardinal Wiseman to all Roman 
Catholic missionaries whom he might meet. As a 
final touch he carried several bags of horse-chestnuts 
“against the evil eye and as a charm to ward off sick¬ 
ness.” Others are welcome to speculate on how far 
he believed in such superstitions. Probably Burton 
himself did not know. Such freaks were a part of the 
monumental inconsistency of the man. 

With time on his hands at Zanzibar, then the great 
port of entry in East Africa, before starting for the 
interior he indulged in a characteristic gesture of ad¬ 
venture. Chartering a crazy Arab boat, he and Speke 


101 


The Pilgrim Adventurer 

made a “preliminary canter” northward to Mombasa. 
Then they turned southward as far as Pangany and 
went on foot and by canoe to the forbidden city of 
Fuga—“an unfenced heap of haycock huts.” The Sul¬ 
tan Kimwere was old and sick, and when they an¬ 
nounced themselves as European “wizards and Wag- 
anga of peculiar power over the moon, the stars, the 
wind, and the rain,” he demanded a demonstration 
in the form of an elixir that would restore his youth, 
health, and strength. This was too large an order for 
the impromptu wizards, and they promptly and quietly 
withdrew to seek a less dangerous field for the exercise 
of their powers. 

It was late in June of 1857 when they finally left 
Zanzibar for Lake Tanganyika, Burton, Speke, Sudy 
Bombay, two Goa boys, two negro gun bearers, and 
ten Zanzibar mercenaries. Both white men suffered 
grievously from fever on the way. At one time Burton 
was partially paralyzed and Speke nearly blind from 
malaria. They passed through a slave country and 
once fought off a band of raiders. To add to their 
troubles, the mercenaries rebelled and plotted to kill 
the leaders. Burton’s gift of tongues nipped this in 
the bud. Two men walked behind him in a narrow 
trail and discussed how and when to strike. Burton 
understood their speech, and when one of them urged 
“Strike now!” he thrust back with his dagger. There 
was one mercenary the less and the rebellion was over. 

Some of Burton’s critics at home made much of such 
happenings as this and accused him of reddening his 
hands daily with native blood. Burton added fuel to 


102 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

this flame with his occasional freakish bursts of boast¬ 
fulness and resentment. Sometimes his mordant sense 
of humor saved the situation. A medical friend in 
England once asked him, “How do you feel when you 
have killed a man?” Burton’s reply was prompt. 
“Very jolly, doctor, how do you?’’ 

It was an eight months’ trek from Zanzibar to Lake 
Tanganyika, which they reached in the middle of Feb¬ 
ruary, 1858. So far there seems to have been the best 
of feeling between Burton and Speke. Together they 
had endured fever, thirst, the treachery of their own 
men, and the assaults of the slavers. Together they 
explored the great lake in an Arab boat reaching the 
northernmost point and crossing to Kazembe’s country 
on the western shore. Storms swept down on them, 
nearly drowning them and frightening their men into 
a panic. 

On the way out they separated. Burton going direct 
to Zanzibar while Speke swung off northward to Vic¬ 
toria Nyanza. Burton loitered at Zanzibar and again 
at Aden until he learned that Speke had come out and 
was on his way to England with the report that he had 
found the true source of the Nile in Victoria. Isis 
was unveiled at last. Burton held out for Tanganyika, 
and there was bad blood between the two comrades 
who had borne so much together. The observations 
of both men were of the scantiest rough-and-ready 
sort, but later explorations were to prove that Speke’s 
guess was the more nearly correct one. 

Burton’s work on this occasion was marked by the 
tragic futility that so often characterized it. After 


103 


The Pilgrim Adventurer 

Tanganyika the trip to Victoria was an easy jaunt, but 
he scorned it, serene in the belief that his work was 
done. At a time when it was doubly important to bear 
his report to England in person he loitered by the way 
like an unwilling schoolboy and permitted his more 
thrifty rival to reap the first harvest of applause. This 
was the story more than once repeated through his 
life, and the greatest tragedy of all was that he had 
stopped short so near the truth, had guessed where he 
should have known. 

Burton’s wanderings were not to end while life and 
strength were left to him, but now a change came over 
them. In 1863 he married Miss Arundell, whom he 
had met at Boulogne in the days before the pilgrimage 
to Mecca. Now he had an ally, although not always 
a tactful or effective one. The first fruit of his wife’s 
work in his behalf was the consulship at Fernando Po, 
on the West Coast of Africa. The honor was a doubt¬ 
ful one. The place was a white man’s grave, and white 
women were unknown there. English ships stopped 
only long enough to clear cargo and then fled as from 
the plague, although the port rules required them to 
wait eighteen hours for correspondence to be answered. 
The first captain in after Burton’s installation as consul 
demanded prompt clearance and sneered at the port 
rule as not enforceable. Burton informed him that 
if he sailed before the eighteen hours had passed there 
would be two shots fired from the battery at the harbor 
mouth, one across his bows and if that was not effective 
the other through the hull of his ship. The captain 


104 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

fumed but waited. A wild gypsy was a new figure at 
a consul’s desk. 

The natives, too, had something to learn. Here was 
a man whom the heat and fever mists of the Tropics 
had not yet broken. Early In his Incumbency a negro, 
proud of his knowledge of English, entered and slapped 
the new consul on the back. “Shake hands, consul. 
How d’ye do?” Burton’s answer was a shout for his 
boys. “HI, Kroo boys, just throw this nigger out the 
window, will you?” And they did. 

As a consul Burton was not a marked success, but 
everywhere he found things to Interest his vivid, 
wandering spirit, and always material for more books 
which he poured out tirelessly. From Fernando Po he 
went on a special mission to the King of Dahomey with 
a message from the Queen and the Injunction to sup¬ 
press the human sacrifices of the Great Customs. His 
mission failed, but he was well received and saw the 
famous Amazons of the King’s bodyguard. 

His next post was at Santos In Brazil. It was the 
time when Paraguay was fighting an unequal war with 
Brazil, Argentine, and Uruguay, a war that wiped out 
four-fifths of the population of Paraguay. That coun¬ 
try was not on Burton’s beat, but he crossed It twice 
while the war was on and when It came time to return 
to England he did so by crossing the Continent to 
Arlca In Peru and going home by way of the Straits of 
Magellan. 

When he was appointed consul at Damascus In 
1869 he knew real happiness for the first time In 
years. Now he was back In his beloved East, officially 


The Pilgrim Adventurer 105 

planted In the great capital at the place where all the 
desert trails crossed. But the evil fates of the Burtons 
still dogged their heels. Mrs. Burton began it by mak¬ 
ing one of her frequent unwise friendships, this time 
with Jane Digby el Megrab, an English adventuress 
who had married a native chieftain. Burton set his 
heart on visiting the ruins of Tadmor in the desert. 
The route was controlled by Jane Digby’s tribesmen 
and she demanded £250 for a safe conduct. Burton 
refused to pay the price, and Jane pretended to accede 
and loaned him one of her own Bedouins with secret 
orders to lead the party into an ambush and hold them 
for heavy ransom. Burton was too old a hand at 
desert travel to be caught by so obvious a trick, and 
before they were out of sight of Damascus he had 
forced the guide to turn over to him his own Arab 
mare as hostage. As a result they saw the ruins and 
returned in safety. 

On another expedition with Drake and Palmer, 
English archeologists, their guide demanded £25 to 
lead them out in safety. On their return they com¬ 
plained to the Turkish governor and a short time later 
were shown the head of the rascally guide with the 
query if that was justice enough to suit them. At¬ 
tacked by 150 Nazarenes, Burton fired his revolver in 
the air and the whole 150 ran pell-mell. He was prov¬ 
ing that even a consul may find adventure enough and 
to spare. In fact, if he had stuck to his adventures he 
might have ended his days at Damascus. Unfortu¬ 
nately his unflagging interest in native life led him to 
take too active a part in a local religious controversy 


106 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

and just when he was expecting each mail to bring him 
approval of his course from the Foreign Office it 
brought him instead notice of the appointment of his 
successor. 

It was at Trieste instead of his beloved Damascus 
that he wore out the last years of his life. Here he 
found leisure for the task that he had contemplated 
for over thirty years, the translation of The Thousand 
and One Nights, the work that was to bring him fame, 
money, and a knighthood. This was published in 
1885-6. Here he also finished his translation of 
Camoens—a wanderer like himself. One line from 
this might almost have served for an epitaph of the 
translator: “Deeds that deserve, like gods, a death¬ 
less name.” 

During the same period he brought out his transla¬ 
tion of Catullus and also The Scented Garden, a little 
known Persian poem. 

There were a few short trips, one to Morocco and 
one to India. When Palmer, his friend of Damascus 
days, was cut off by natives in the Sinaitic Peninsula 
during the rebellion of Arabi Pasha, he asked per¬ 
mission to go to his relief. His request was denied 
and almost the same mail brought news of the tragic 
death of his friend. This was the last flare of the old 
wild spirit. 

His death in 1890, at the age of sixty-nine, found 
him established in the good graces of respectable Eng¬ 
land. The day was long past when men refused to 
mention his name except to censure. Time had dimmed 
the memory of some of his earlier indiscretions of 


107 


The Pilgrim Adventurer 

speech. Perhaps, too, his rank and his prosperity had 
tamed his tongue and given him a clearer vision for 
his own advantage. But to the end of his days he 
carried something of the Elizabethan swashbuckler, of 
high and scornful courage, of contempt for the timid 
souls who slept in comfortable beds and fed their 
minds on the safe conservative food offered by The 
Times and The Spectator. 

Men speak of him today, first as an Orientalist, but 
it is doubtful if that was his soundest claim to fame. 
He knew many languages, but rather as the natives 
spoke them in the bazaars and along the caravan trails 
than as they were found in libraries and in documents 
of state. He was in too great haste to be able to con¬ 
trol his pace to the slow, sure step of the scholar. In 
the forty years of his active career he published nearly 
fifty books, books of travel, grammars of native dia¬ 
lects, translations. These are some of the titles: 
Sinde; Pilgrimage to Mecca; The Highlands of 
Brazil; Zanzibar; First Footprints in Africa; The 
Gold Coast; not forgetting the monumental transla¬ 
tion of The Arabian Nights. As an explorer he was 
second to none of his time, although others too often 
gathered the fruits. He knew much of savage tribes 
and customs, but in the spirit of the reporter rather 
than that of the scientist. His writing was turgid and 
hurried, but packed full of odd, interesting facts. 
When he traveled he went as the native went, almost 
alone and living on the country and not with the great 
safari of Stanley’s time. As a result he saw many things 
that were denied to the eyes of men more carefully 


108 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

guarded. Always he carried his head high whether in 
London drawing-room or the blood-reeking palace at 
Harar. His explorations were useful not alone for 
what he found but also for the incentive they gave 
other men of his own time and later to go out and 
seek what lay hidden in the jungle or across the desert. 
Again as in the time of Drake and Hawkins a great 
wind from the hidden corners of the earth blew into 
contented England and Burton opened more than one 
window to its coming. 

After his death Swinburne wrote into memorial 
verse some thought of this Englishman who was born 
too late and lived most of his life too far beyond the 
narrow limits of his countrymen’s gaze. 

While England sees not her old praise dim, 

While still her stars through the world’s night swim 
A fame outshining her Raleigh’s fame, 

A light that lightens her loud sea’s rim. 

Shall shine and sound as her sons proclaim 
The pride that kindles at Burton’s name. 

And joy shall exalt their pride to be 
The same in birth if in soul the same. 

But we that yearn for a friend’s face,—we 
Who lack the light that on earth was he,— 

Mourn, though the light be a quenchless flame 
That shines as dawn on a tideless sea. 


VI 


JOHNNY POE, ATHLETE, COWBOY, MINER, 

AND SOLDIER 

Romance doesn’t disappear; it only changes its form. 
The rainbow can be seen from the window of a sky¬ 
scraper or a college dormitory just as well as from a 
mountain top or from the deck of a square-rigger. 

When the class of 1895 graduated from Princeton 
probably most of the boys said farewell to the dreams 
of romance and adventure. The golden days were 
done. The future held only the prospect of the daily 
job and the routine of office or store or shop. 

For one of them, however, the drama was just be¬ 
ginning. That was Johnny Poe. The Poes are a 
famous family at Princeton. Six brothers of them 
graduated from the New Jersey college from 1884 
to 1902, and all six of them left college wearing the 
coveted P of Princeton varsity football. And the 
greatest of them all was Johnny. A small man in a 
football day when there was a heavy premium on size, 
he was never overmatched in offensive or defensive 
skill, and he was a sure, intelligent player. He had 
brains and courage, which are the prime qualities of 
the real athlete. The story is told of him that in his 
two years on the Princeton varsity he missed only one 

109 


110 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

tackle, which so distressed him that he was on the point 
of turning in his uniform. He worked at football as 
few men do. In his leisure hours in his room, when 
other men were loafing or reading or talking, he prac¬ 
ticed hours at a time passing a football into a pile of 
pillows to develop speed and sureness. 

After he left college he tried business for a time, 
but his restless spirit refused to fit itself into the mould 
of the daily grind. It was action that he longed for, 
and above all, fighting. As he wrote to a friend at 
one time, “My ambition is to see wars in new coun¬ 
tries.” He was to see them in both new and old, but 
there were several disappointments before this hope 
was realized. In 1898 the war with Spain came to 
many youngsters as a fresh breeze in a stale, irksome 
room. And many had the same experience that fell 
to young Poe—months of training, but no action. His 
regiment, the Fifth Maryland, got no nearer Spanish 
soil than Tampa, Florida. But he found it very much 
to his liking as far as it went. From Chickamauga 
he wrote to a classmate, “All this fuss about the hard¬ 
ships of a soldier’s life makes me tired. Of course, 
if a fellow gets plugged or is sick it is hard, but as long 
as he keeps well and doesn’t get wounded it’s a cinch.” 

A year later opportunity knocked at his door again. 
He could have had a commission at the end of the 
Spanish war, but he refused it, preferring to remain 
a free lance with a chance to go to the next war wher¬ 
ever it might be. It is to be feared that it was excite¬ 
ment rather than a righteous cause that he sought then. 
His frankness was refreshing when he wrote that he 


Ill 


Athlete^ Cowboy, Miner and Soldier 

was eager to go to war, “no matter where or on what 
side—they are both usually wrong, so it doesn’t make 
much difference which one chooses.” There is evi¬ 
dence, however, that he finally found a war that he 
believed in. 

Although he had scorned a commission, the Philip¬ 
pine insurrection in 1899 called him into the service 
as an enlisted man, soon to be made a corporal in the 
23rd Infantry. His football reputation followed him 
into the army. One day he was doing sentry duty at 
a post in the island of Jolo when an officer asked him 
if he was any relation to Arthur Poe. 

“Yes, sir. Brother,” said the corporal. 

“Brother, eh? Well, your brother won the football 
game.” 

And Corporal Poe had to go on walking post for 
four mortal hours before he could get down to the 
company canteen and see the letters and papers that 
told how his younger brother had kicked a goal from 
the field in the last minute of play against Yale. 

In the Philippines, as in Cuba, this fighting man had 
no trouble getting into the service, but getting into a 
fight was something else. Months dragged by and he 
wearied of the unending garrison service with no smell 
of powder except on the rifle range. So he bought his 
freedom from the unexpired time of this enlistment. 
The story of the next few years is almost pathetic. So 
much fighting spirit and nowhere to spend it. He went 
into the Marine Corps for action on the Isthmus of 
Panama—and didn’t get it. It was action he wanted 
all the time, not pay or glory or rank. The story is 


112 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

told of him that when he went into the Corps, Col. 
Waller, then in command, offered to make him a cor¬ 
poral. Johnny demurred that he didn’t know enough 
to be a corporal. “Don’t know enough?” quoth Wal¬ 
ler. “You know more than most of my lieutenants.” 
“I know,” said Johnny, “but you must know something 
to be a corporal.” In spite of that, he was a sergeant 
before his term of service ended. 

Then there was the time that he enlisted in the Ken¬ 
tucky militia to get into a feud war that had called 
the National Guard into one of the mountain counties 
of that state. 

He had seen something of the mining country of Ne¬ 
vada, then enjoying a boom, and when fighting faded 
over his horizon he turned back to that desert country. 
On the other side of Death Valley was Echo Canyon, 
a new camp. Poe hiked twenty-five miles through the 
blazing desert and reached the diggings thoroughly 
equipped with a toothbrush, a comb, a towel, and a 
silver soapbox. Soon after his arrival Old Man Hicks, 
a polite old fellow with a jail record in Idaho for 
killing his man in a saloon brawl, viewed the soapbox 
reposing on a rock near a washbasin and drawled out, 
“Who brought his trunk? Is it non-explosive?” On 
the way across Death Valley Poe looked up the mine 
reported by “Death Valley” Scotty, then receiving 
great publicity in the newspapers because of his story 
of a rich strike. All he found were three empty money 
chests of the kind used by express companies for the 
shipment of gold. 

In 1907 word came of a promising war between 


Athlete, Cowboy, Miner and Soldier 113 

Nicaragua and Honduras. This threw gold mining 
into the shade for the time being, and the restless wan¬ 
derer took ship for Nicaragua. The boat touched first 
at Honduras, and Johnny decided that a war in sight 
was worth two over the border. So he enlisted in the 
Honduran army and found himself a captain and in 
command of a gun in the defense of Amapala. It was 
a far cry from the days of Walker, the Filibuster, but 
El Capitan Poey, as the Hondurans called him, would 
have found many kindred spirits in the ranks that 
followed that little fighter. 

There was a humorous anti-climax to the Honduran 
episode. When the war unraveled itself the ex-captain 
elected to make his way out of Honduras by way of 
Nicaragua, the late enemy country. He was in danger 
of being arrested as a spy and introduced to the interior 
of a Nicaraguan jail. In his extremity he appealed 
to the commander of the U. S. gunboat Princeton for 
passage home. The name of the boat must have 
seemed a good omen. The captain evidently knew his 
man and his background, and readily consented if Poe 
hadn’t too much baggage. “I haven’t much,” said 
Poe. “Well, about how much?” the captain insisted. 
“Only fifty-four pieces,” drawled Johnny. The captain 
gasped. But he was game. “Let’s see them,” he said. 
“Perhaps we can do it anyway.” Johnny kicked the 
battered handbag lying on the wharf at his feet. It 
fell open and there were the fifty-four pieces—a pair 
of socks and a pack of cards. 

Down to date his experience had been unique. He 
was a veteran of five wars and in only one had he seen 


114 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

any fighting. But the curtain was almost ready to rise 
on the biggest scene of all. There was a brief inter¬ 
mission while he coached football at Princeton and dug 
gold in Nevada. Thomas Riggs, another Princeton 
man, was in charge of the American survey party that 
was co-operating with the Canadians in cutting a line 
through to the Arctic marking the boundary between 
Alaska and Canada. Poe joined this, and the work 
carried him nearly two hundred miles north of the 
Klondike and filled two years of his life. 

When midsummer of 1914 shocked the world with 
news that Armageddon had come, Poe had been back 
in his Nevada mining camps for two years. The one 
word WAR was enough for him. He landed in Eng¬ 
land in September and became a soldier in the British 
army, and in a few weeks was in France. His first 
billet was in the heavy artillery, which did not please 
him. He had enlisted for a fight, and doing it at a 
range of eight to ten thousand yards after the fashion 
of a mechanic tending a steam shovel was not his idea 
of excitement. So he applied for a transfer to the 
infantry. It was a singular coincidence that his next 
step landed him in the Black Watch, a Scottish regi¬ 
ment with a record of glory in every war that the 
English flag had seen for a hundred and fifty years. 

Soon after his transfer he wrote to a college friend 
in America: “I did not care for the heavy artillery 
but do like the Black Watch, though I find the broad 
Scotch difficult to understand. The Black Watch made 
a fine charge on May 9, carrying a trench after several 
other regiments had failed to do so. The pipers played 


Athlete^ Cowboy, Miner and Soldier 115 

the ‘Highland Laddie.’ I was not in the battalion then, 
so what Ahab, King of Israel, said unto Ben Adad, 
King of Assyria, applies in my case.” 

[And the King of Israel answered and said. Tell 
him. Let not him that girdeth on his harness boast 
himself as he that putteth it off. I Kings 20:11.] 

At the end of this letter there is a characteristic 
observation: “The prevailing type of man in the Black 
Watch is short and stocky. There are many shorter 
even than I am.” 

Death came to him in action, as he would have 
chosen. It was September 25, 1915, almost exactly a 
year from the day he had taken the King’s shilling. 

Johnny Poe was an adventurer with the old blood in 
his veins. But he was more. His letters show a back¬ 
ground of thought and reading unusual in a man of 
action. It was no ordinary man who wrote this para¬ 
graph: “Though living side by side with wife-desert¬ 
ers, crooks, a child-murderer, and some of the scum 
of the earth (this was in one of the Nevada gold 
camps), I think the fact of being a Princeton man was 
as a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night in keep¬ 
ing me from sinking to their level, and the knowledge 
that old Mother Princeton wishes to believe of her 
sons as Isabella of Croix did of Quentin Durward, 
‘If I hear not of you soon, and that by the trumpet of 
fame. I’ll conclude you dead, but not unworthy.’ I 
suspect some of the ’95 men have feared I have taken 
as awkward a way of gratifying this wish as did the 
recruit when he loaded his rifle by shoving the cartridge 
down the muzzle, and when reproved by his sergeant 


116 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

replied, ‘There is more than one way of loading a 
rifle.’ ” 

From the same camp he wrote of his surroundings: 
“We are six thousand feet high here and in the midst 
of a desert. No trees or grass! Water costs one 
dollar per barrel. The scenery reminds me a good 
deal of the Red Sea shores with Mt. Sinai looming up, 
where, as a tough soldier once said, ‘Col. Moses went 
up to get them ten general orders.’ Some people would 
think this the place where ‘nobody don’t live and dogs 
bark at strangers,’ but I like it.” 

H is last letter to his Princeton classmates ended 
with the toast of the ranchmen and miners of the old 
days. “I looks toward you and likewise bows. I hope 
I sees you well.” And it came with good grace from 
his unconquerable spirit. 

There were many tributes paid to his memory when 
word came back from France that the stocky little 
fighter had fought his last battle. A verse from a poem 
by “The Bentztown Bard” in the Baltimore Sun^ 
Poe’s home town when he had one, gives the keynote: 

Somewhere in France a brave heart beats no more, 
Somewhere in France he made his final score; 

On with the Black Watch, charging brave and grim— 
Somewhere in France—and all so much like him 
To die adventuring to the soul’s high notch— 

Our own loved soldier of the brave Black Watch. 


VII 


SCOTT OF THE ANTARCTIC 

Never, perhaps, has such a universal thrill of sym¬ 
pathy and sorrow run through the world as that which 
late in 1912 followed the announcement of the death 
of Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his companions 
in the British South Polar Expedition of 1911-12. 
Scott and several of his companions were experienced 
in Polar work. He had been in command of the 1901 
expedition when the farthest south up to that time 
was reached. His experience on that occasion had 
fully prepared him for further attempts. With the 
exception of Admiral Peary and Captain Amundsen, 
there was no one in the world more fitted to deal with 
the severe problems that the Antarctic region presents. 

His expedition had been prepared with all the care 
that experience, knowledge, and forethought could 
command. The world had been ransacked for the best 
that it had to offer of equipment and method. The 
personnel was picked with reference to every difficulty 
that could arise. The route over which they were to 
travel to the Pole was known, the s^ame as that which 
Shackleton had traversed three years before when he 
came within a hundred miles of the goal. And the 
result was success, overclouded with the supreme 
tragedy of polar exploration. 

117 


118 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

Robert Falcon Scott was born to the sea. The place 
of his birth was Devonport, hard by Plymouth whence 
Drake had sailed to meet the Armada and where many 
of the great sea adventures of Elizabeth’s time had 
their beginning. It was from this same port of Ply¬ 
mouth that the little Mayflower cleared in 1620. 
When he was thirteen years old he became a naval 
cadet on the Britannia and passed in due course 
through the lower grades of the service. The devel¬ 
opment of the torpedo interested him, and he pres¬ 
ently became a specialist and an expert in this branch 
of the service. In 1900 he was made a commander, 
and at the end of that year took leave of absence to 
prepare for his work as captain of the Discovery expe¬ 
dition of 1901-2 to the Antarctic. 

Even as late as this, practically nothing was known 
of the South Polar continent. There had been many 
expeditions, Kemp, Wilkes, Nares, Drygalski, Ross, 
Weddell, Cook, Borchgrevink, and many more, but 
few of them had done more than land on the shore of 
this bleak land, and many not even that. The 1901 
expedition was in some sense an amateur effort. Prac¬ 
tically none of the men had had real polar experience, 
and all had much to learn of the practical side of the 
work. The second in command was Lieut. Armitage, 
but the most important member of the party next to 
the captain was Lieut. Shackleton, who later acquired 
a high reputation for his work in command of his own 
party. He was a product of the merchant marine and 
at this time also untried in polar work. 

The Discovery, as the ship was called, had an easy 


Scott of the Antarctic 119 

voyage south, touching land first at Cape Crozier, due 
south from New Zealand, and cruising eastward along 
the Barrier Ice that Ross had found here in 1839. The 
first event of importance was the discovery of King 
Edward VII land, which Ross had reported sixty-two 
years before as the “appearance” of land. This part 
of the voyage was full of thrills for the untried mari¬ 
ners in these dangerous waters. On one occasion the 
ship was lost like a man in a dense woods. The 
weather was thick with puffy winds, the compass be¬ 
haved badly, and in attempting to dodge through the 
open lanes among the ice floes Scott discovered that 
they had made a complete circle and were in process 
of describing another when he came on deck. 

On this cruise observations were made of the sur¬ 
face of the Barrier Ice, both by short trips from the 
ship and also from a captive balloon which had been 
brought for that purpose. Their first winter quarters 
provided plenty of work and also some amusement. 
Ship and huts were both soon drifted over with snow, 
and frequent blizzards made winter travel intermittent 
and dangerous. On one occasion a party returning to 
the ship was caught in a blizzard and made the fatal 
mistake of abandoning the sledge and dogs, under the 
impression that they were nearly home. Three of 
the men fell over a cliff, fortunately landing on a 
snow-covered ledge. Another, Vince, was not so lucky 
and was lost in the sea at the foot of the cliff. The 
only sensible man in this party seems to have been 
“Young” Evans who wandered back to the sledge and 
lay down in the snow. He was soon drifted over and 


120 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

stayed there for forty hours, without food, suffering 
no harm except such inconvenience as extreme hunger 
causes. 

In his journal Scott makes frequent mention of their 
ignorance of proper methods. Many did not even 
know how to adjust their clothing properly for the 
high winds and low temperatures that they encoun¬ 
tered. But they learned fast. Fortunately their equip¬ 
ment was adequate, and they soon learned its proper 
use. Early in November, 1902, Scott, Shackleton, 
and Dr. E. A. Wilson set out on their southern trip. 
They apparently had little serious expectation of reach¬ 
ing the Pole, but they were anxious to set a new south¬ 
ern mark. This they did at 83° South Latitude, far 
surpassing the attempts of any previous explorers. 
They had covered 350 miles in 59 days, and on the 
back trail they did the distance in 34 days. As polar 
trips go it was not unduly difficult, although Shackle- 
ton broke down on the return trip and had to be sent 
out with the relief ship Morning before the next win¬ 
ter. There was another winter of observation and 
research, and late in October, 1903, Scott made a long 
journey to the west in what is called South Victoria 
Land. He succeeded in reaching a point three hundred 
miles from the ship at an altitude of nine thousand 
feet. They were back in England early in 1904, and 
Scott was given the rank of Captain for his Antarctic 
work. 

Now comes a gap of six years, during which he was 
occupied with the routine work of a naval officer in 
active service. Antarctic interest was growing, how- 


121 


Scott of the Antarctic 

ever, and his eyes kept turning to the southward. In 
1908 this was intensified by Shackleton’s exploit in 
reaching 88° 23' South, only about a hundred miles 
from the Pole. Then in 1909 came the announcement 
of Peary’s success at 90° North. It was inevitable 
that a man whose appetite had been whetted by one 
successful trip should dare fate again. Plans were 
begun late in 1909, a ship secured, the Terra Nova, 
equipment was brought together, and the officers and 
crew selected. One of the important members was 
Dr. E. A. Wilson, who had been with Scott in the 
southward journey in 1902. 

It was late in November, 1910, early in the Antarc¬ 
tic summer, that the Terra Nova sailed from Lyttle- 
ton. New Zealand, bound for Ross Island, at the mar¬ 
gin of the Barrier Ice. The problem of Antarctic ex¬ 
ploration is doubly harder than of the Arctic. In the 
first place, home ports from which the start may be 
made are more remote than is the case in the north. 
Then the South Pole lies in the middle of a frozen con¬ 
tinent at an altitude of nearly ten thousand feet, in¬ 
volving an overland march of nearly a thousand miles. 
In the north. Admiral Peary was able to lay his ship 
in winter quarters only about five hundred miles from 
the pole itself. This great polar continent is lined 
with glaciers, and these in turn with the belt of Barrier 
Ice which rises in great cliffs around practically the 
whole polar coast. In the north the problem of travel 
over the sea ice that surrounds the Pole is largely one 
of avoidance of open leads and luck in finding weather 
conditions that permit of travel. Temperatures do not 


122 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

vary greatly north or south, but there is one important 
difference. In the Arctic the extremely low tempera¬ 
tures are seldom accompanied by winds and are fre¬ 
quently periods of dead calm. In the Antarctic there 
are frequent storms characterized by intense cold and 
wind of such velocity as to make travel unthinkable. 
The high altitude reached on the summit plateau 
aggravates this condition, and makes a still greater 
drag on vitality. Then, too, the South is practically 
barren of land-animal life that can be made to supply 
food. Seals are abundant in places and there are pen¬ 
guins and gulls. But there is nothing to compare with 
the herds of musk ox that Arctic explorers have found 
on the Arctic islands. There are no bears, neither 
smaller animals such as foxes or hares. Once away 
from the Antarctic shore the continent that surrounds 
the Pole is empty of every form of life. 

It was necessary to use the greatest care in select¬ 
ing the place for the base camp from which the dash 
to the Pole was to be made. The Discovery expedition 
had wintered at what had come to be called Hut Point 
on the southern end of Ross Island. This lies directly 
south of New Zealand and is separated from the Bar¬ 
rier Ice by only four or five miles of water that is by 
turns open sea and packed with floe ice. Captain 
Scott had the most active memory of the miserable 
winter that had been passed at Hut Point, open as it 
was to the full sweep of the prevailing winter winds 
with no safe anchorage for the ship. He hoped to 
find a more sheltered lee in another part of the island, 


Scott of the Antarctic 123 

but in other respects his plans were similar to those 
that had been laid for the earlier effort. 

Almost as soon as they cleared from the last New 
Zealand port disaster threatened them. They ran into 
heavy gales, and were compelled to heave to while 
seas, mountain-high, poured over the rail. The men 
on deck were at times buried waist or neck deep in 
green water. Everything that was not lashed fast 
fetched loose, and there were times when the bags of 
extra coal that were piled on deck threatened to batter 
away the upper works. To add to their troubles the 
steam pumps clogged, and the water rose above the 
engine-room gratings. A little more and the ship 
would have been nothing but a water-logged hulk 
drifting helpless in the trough and sagging down to 
her end on the bottom. 

The hand pumps could make no head against the 
water that was pouring in at every plunge, and the 
Chief Engineer reported that he must soon draw the 
fires to prevent an explosion. A bucket line was set at 
work, and this apparently futile effort was just enough 
to hold level with the seas and even to gain a little. 
In the respite that this gave, a volunteer force dug 
through the coal in the bunkers that surrounded the 
pump well and finally managed to clear the suction and 
get the steam pumps going. They clogged again and 
were cleared again. So they won through till the gale 
moderated and that danger was past. 

Their first sight of Antarctic land was the two sinis¬ 
ter peaks of Erebus and Terror rising on Ross Island- 
To the westward lay McMurdo Sound where they 


124 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

hoped to find a safe anchorage and a sheltered spot 
for their winter camp. This was found at Cape Evans 
on the western side of the island. It was far better 
than the southern point where they had wintered ten 
years before. Eastward the Barrier Ice stretched for 
four hundred miles with few breaks in its line of cliffs 
where loaded parties could ascend. In the course of 
landing, Ponting, the photographer of the expedition, 
had a narrow escape. He was standing on an ice-floe 
near the ship when Scott saw a school of killer whales 
approaching. These are appropriately called the 
tigers of the sea. They far surpass the shark in size 
and strength, and are fully equal in ferocity. As they 
neared the floe Ponting ran to the edge of it to secure 
photographs. The killers dived beneath, and in an’ 
instant the floe was broken in pieces as they rose under 
it, driving their powerful heads and backs against it. 
Ponting fortunately escaped by the luck of being on 
one of the larger pieces from which he was able to 
reach the ship, but there was no question in Scott’s 
mind, as he watched, that the killers were deliberately 
attacking the man. 

The most important work of this first Antarctic sum¬ 
mer was the laying of depots to the southward to aid 
in the dash for the Pole that was to be made a year 
later. While one party did this under the direction of 
Scott, another worked to the eastward, partly for the 
purpose of exploring the edge of the Barrier Ice in 
this direction and partly to make scientific observa¬ 
tions of wind and current conditions. The depot 
parties used ponies and dogs for transport purposes,^ 


125 


Scott of the Antarctic 

and traveled mostly at night when the harder snow 
made sledging easier. The farthest depot was es¬ 
tablished at 79° 28approximately six hundred 
and thirty miles in an airline from the Pole. The 
Work was carried on with few incidents except that on 
the return journey to Cape Evans one of the dog teams 
fell Into a crevasse In a glacier and was recovered only 
after hard and fast work on the part of the men In 
charge. At the finish It was necessary to lower Scott 
sixty feet Into the chasm to rescue two of the dogs that 
had dropped out of their harness. 

There was bad news for them, though, when their 
comrades of the eastern party rejoined them at the 
base camp. Captain Amundsen’s Norwegian party 
was established at the Bay of Whales, east of Ross 
Island, and a hundred and twenty-six miles nearer the 
Pole. This was a distressing confirmation of rumors 
that had reached them before they left New Zealand. 
Nothing was known for certain of how soon their 
rivals would make their start for the Pole. Whatever 
might be the facts as to this. It was futile for the Eng¬ 
lishmen to attempt to hurry their preparations. A 
Polar dash, however thrilling It may sound at a safe 
distance, is In reality a slow crawl of a few miles a 
day over a surface that makes every step almost a 
matter for individual judgment. Under such condi¬ 
tions fifteen miles a day Is a long march, and an average 
of ten maintained throughout the whole campaign Is 
as much as can be hoped for In safety under ordinary 
conditions. To make even this possible careful prepa¬ 
rations must be made, depots set up, men, dogs, and 


126 Boys* Own Book of '^Adventurers 

ponies especially trained, equipment thoroughly over¬ 
hauled, and observations compiled and analyzed. It 
was futile, then, to attempt to hurry the preliminary 
stages. If the Norwegians beat them to the goal they 
could only wish them good luck and Godspeed. 

Before the first summer was over they had begun 
to have doubts of the value of their Siberian ponies. 
These required a large quantity of food in that hard 
climate, and their strength failed rapidly on short 
rations. Three of them out of the original nineteen 
were lost on drift ice in McMurdo Sound, and two 
more perished in a blizzard. The motor sledges, of 
which they had brought three, were also tried out with 
mixed results. The best results were with the dogs, 
which had been the universal experience in the Arctic. 

The winter storms came on early in 1911, and on 
the way back the depot party were stormbound at the 
old Discovery hut at Hut Point. It was a bleak and 
cruel place, and they were ill prepared for such an 
experience. But Scott’s diary makes light of the hard¬ 
ships. In fact, the performance of the blubber stove 
which smoked them into the semblance of negroes 
excites more comment than did the more serious side 
of this uncomfortable vacation. “We are all as black 
as sweeps and our various garments are covered with 
oily soot. We look a fearful gang of ruffians.” 

It was April 13 when they landed back at Cape 
Evans with all hands in good health but with nine 
ponies now missing out of the original nineteen. St. 
George’s day, April 23, was the last day of sun. Now 
the Antarctic night shut down, and for nearly six 


Scott of the Antarctic 127 

months there would be no more light than an occasional 
drear twilight and the regular visits of the moon. But 
it was not a winter of Idleness or of discontent. Scott 
makes frequent reference to the cheerful, willing spirit 
of all the men. There was no quarreling, no soldier¬ 
ing. Each man had his tasks to accomplish. A pit was 
kept open through the Ice of McMurdo Sound for a 
tidal gauge. Telephone wires were strung to both 
these points and eventually to the old hut at Hut Point, 
some fifteen miles away. 

Everyone was busy with his appointed tasks—study 
of geology, meteorology, ice behavior, winds and cur¬ 
rents, bird life. Careful observations were made of 
diet and its effect on both men and animals. Ponies 
and dogs must be exercised regularly. Scott experi¬ 
mented with the possibility of keeping himself warm 
in a hole dug In the snow In extreme cold and found, 
as the dogs already knew, that even low temperatures 
could be endured. Debenham Invented what he called 
a wheeled sledge for use on hard surface where the 
glide was poor for runners. Seaman Evans designed 
a new type of ski boots and binding that permitted the 
use of a soft sole with many foot coverings. Dr. 
Atkinson worked out an Improvement on the blubber 
stove that had given them so much trouble at Hut 
Point. Nearly every evening there were lectures and 
conferences on all imaginable subjects connected with 
their daily work or any other subject for which the 
lecturer offered special knowledge or experience. 
Ponting gave picture shows that ranged from the siz¬ 
zling tropics to themselves In the frozen south. 


128 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

One diversion was a midwinter trip by Dr. Wilson, 
Lieut. Bowers, and Cherry-Garrard to the Emperor 
penguin rookery on the east side of Ross Island. They 
were absent five weeks, and they were weeks of strug¬ 
gle through blizzards in intense cold. The lowest 
point reached was seventy-seven degrees below zero, 
a hundred and nine degrees of frost. Amundsen had 
experienced seventy-nine degrees below in the Arctic, 
but in a dead calm. This was with a puffy wind that 
struck like a bullet. In one storm their tent blew 
away, and they lay in their sleeping bags under a 
blanket of snow for forty-eight hours without food. 
Fortunately, when the storm moderated they recovered 
their tent and returned to safety. 

As spring approached in October, active prepara¬ 
tions for the polar march began. A practice march 
was made to the western mountains with ponies and 
dogs. The men traveled on skis. A distance of a 
hundred and seventy-five miles was covered in ten 
marches, which indicates that men and animals were 
in splendid condition for the supreme test. 

November first was the day of the start for the 
great goal. Here is the program that these men had 
set for themselves: 424 miles over the Barrier Ice to 
the foot of the great Beardmore Glacier; then 125 
miles on the glacier, rising to an altitude of 8,000 feet. 
The final stretch was 353 miles on the summit plateau 
at an altitude that ranged from 8,000 to 10,500 feet. 
To this should be added 21 miles that must be covered 
from the base camp at Cape Evans to the Barrier face. 
It was a round trip of 1,846 miles that they had set 


129 


Scott of the Antarctic 

themselves to make, a task that called for all that they 
had of skill, knowledge, strength, and fortitude. 

The motor sledges led off the procession with extra 
supplies with which to make caches along the way for 
the return trip. The ponies and dogs followed, intent 
on the same task. Last of all marched the polar party, 
five men selected for the last hard marches. They 
were Captain Scott, Dr. Wilson, Lieut. Bowers, Petty 
Officer Evans, and Captain Oates. On their shoulders 
would fall the final burden when the last supporting 
party turned back. It was to be a lonely march, with 
no relief except from within themselves until they 
should find themselves back at One-Ton Camp, the 
farthest south of the depots established the previous 
summer, 175 miles from the base camp. Their sched¬ 
ule called for them to be at this point early in March. 

At the outset the motor sledges balked in the ex¬ 
treme cold, cylinder heads cracked, and they were 
abandoned one by one. This threw additional burdens 
on the dogs and ponies, and on the men. Head winds 
prevailed, and one by one the ponies failed and were 
killed to furnish food for the dogs. The last ponies 
perished at the foot of the glacier at Shambles Camp. 
Now it was the men and dogs. This was December 10. 

The journal of the days over the glacier is a tale 
of heartbreaking effort over crevasses, around up- 
heaved masses of rock and ice, usually against head 
winds, always in severe cold. Already the struggle was 
beginning to tell on the men, but the dogs plodded 
faithfully along. The last supporting party turned 
back on January 4. This was about latitude 88°. 


130 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

From here it was man power alone. By airline to the 
Pole the distance was a hundred and twenty miles. And 
there remained the long pull back to One-Ton Camp, 
the nearest point at which they could expect to find 
relief. They were setting themselves to a march of 
over eight hundred and fifty miles, with nothing but 
their own stout hearts and bodies to see them through. 
Added to this was the danger of missing the back trail 
and losing the reserve food supply that the caches held. 

The hard going continued after they left the gla¬ 
ciers. There were no crevasses, but the wind had blown 
the snow into hard, sharp ridges, the kind that moun¬ 
taineers call sastrugi, and these caught at the runners 
of the sledges and the skis of the men. Sand was 
mixed with the snow in places, and in days of intense 
cold snow crystals formed that dragged almost as 
badly as the sand. Still they settled a little tighter in 
their self-imposed collars and kept on. 

Scott’s journal gives brief flashes of this wearing 
toil. 

“Only eighty-five miles from the Pole, but it’s going 
to be a stiff pull both ways.” 

“Can we keep this up for seven days? It takes it 
out of us like anything.” 

“It is going to be a close thing.” 

“Well, another day with double figures and a bit 
over. The chance holds.” 

On January 15 they made their last cache. From 
here it was veritably a dash. Their observations 
showed that they should be not more than two days’ 
march from the ultimate south. Here is the entry. 


131 


Scott of the Antarctic 

“Four days food and a sundry or two.” . . . “We 
ought to do it now.” 

The next day was one of poignant tragedy. At the 
moment when they were buoyed up by the hope of 
success that rendered their toil and suffering of the 
past two months and a half of little meaning, they 
came upon the unmistakable signs of a camp not more 
than two months old. There were sledge and ski 
tracks and the footprints of dogs—many dogs—all 
pointing toward the Pole. The Norwegians had been 
before them. It was heartbreaking, but they kept on. 
January 17 their observations showed that they had 
reached their goal of 90° South, but the Norwegian 
flag that was flying there was a bitter sight. In the 
tent that still stood they found a record of the date 
of December 16, 1911. They had lost by only thirty 
days. There was also a letter to King Haakon of 
Norway with a request to Scott that he send it on its 
way. This was the crowning touch of tragedy, but the 
letter was to reach its destination, although with sick¬ 
ening delay. The Englishmen gulped down their dis¬ 
appointment and built a cairn of stones on which they 
planted the Union Jack to fly alongside the banner of 
Norway. The North had conquered the South and 
the brave souls of two nations testified to the fact. 

The story of the return trip is fragmentary but 
graphic. Evidently the Norwegians, traveling faster 
and by a slightly different route, had found all the con¬ 
ditions favorable. The weather had been mild, the 
dogs had good footing, and the ski runners, experts 
all of them, had covered the ground at a pace far 


132 Boys^ Own Book of 'Adventurers 

greater than had been possible for Scott and his men. 
Amundsen had made the trip to the pole and back to 
the base camp in ninety-nine days, an average speed of 
22.1 miles a day. The Englishmen had been two 
months and a half on their outward trip and they 
could hardly hope to better it on the return,.even with 
good conditions. Conditions were anything but good, 
but in spite of this they drove their tired bodies unflag- 
gingly. They had been twenty-five days on the out¬ 
ward trip from the edge of the glacier to the Pole. 
They did it on the back trail in twenty-one. This, 
in spite of the fact that the last ten marches on the 
outward way had been down-hill with a drop of a 
thousand feet. This slope they climbed on the way 
out, in the face of a wind that now blew almost steadily 
from the north. Here again luck was against them. 
At that time of the year the prevailing Antarctic winds 
are usually southerly. So Amundsen and his men had 
found them. Scott’s party was just too late for this 
favorable slant and found it blowing in their faces. 
“Nearly seven weeks in low temperature with almost 
incessant wind,” is Scott’s curt weather report of the 
days on the plateau. 

Hardly had they set foot on the glacier when new 
disaster befell them. Scott and Evans dropped 
through a snow bridge into a crevasse, and Evans was 
badly hurt. He struggled on but finally gave out on 
February 17 and died that night. They had missed 
one of the food caches and were marching on short 
rations. Shambles Camp at the edge of the glacier 
gave them abundance of pony meat for rebuilding, but 


Scott of the Antarctic 133 

the weather held bad. In addition to head winds, 
temperatures continued low, ranging from thirty-two 
to forty below. With grim humor Scott records the 
fact that a rise to twenty below zero was a welcome 
relief. From here on it was a desperate plod with 
hope dying hard. The snow crystals that formed on 
the surface made the sledges drag heavily and still 
further reduced the vitality of already weakened men. 
In spite of this fact, out of fifteen marches on the sur¬ 
face of the Barrier Ice, six averaged thirteen miles 
each and five were for ten miles each. These distances 
would have been good under far better conditions and 
they were dragging their sledges with the camp equip¬ 
ment, Instruments, and such reserve food supply as 
they could command. 

The stage was being set for the final scene. Captain 
Oates was badly handicapped by frozen feet and physi¬ 
cal weakness. Fuel was low so there was little chance 
for warmth at night except in their sleeping bags. On 
March 5 Scott notes “poor Oates nearly done.” He 
asked his comrades for advice, and there was but one 
answer. Keep on. He could hardly travel, much less 
drag his share of the load, but he kept on. Five days 
later Scott wrote, “We have seven days food and 
should be about 55 miles from One-Ton Camp tonight; 
5x7 = 42, leaving us thirteen miles short of our dis¬ 
tance, even if things get no worse.” ... “I doubt 
if we can possibly do It.” 

Things grew worse, fatally worse. The next day 
It was 43° below at noon, still with head wind, and 
the march was painfully short. On the fifteenth there 


134 


Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

is a brief entry that Oates begged them to leave him 
in his sleeping bag. Of course they refused. The 
entry of March 17 tells how Oates came to the end of 
the trail: “He was a brave soul. This was the end. 
He slept through the night yesterday—hoping not to 
wake, but he woke in the morning. It was blowing a 
blizzard. He said, ‘I am just going outside and may 
be gone some time.’ He went out into the blizzard 
and we have not seen him since.” “Some time” was 
eternity. 

For two days more the little group, now only three, 
dragged on for short, cruel marches. On March 18 
they came to their last camping ground. Two days’ 
supply of food and one allowance of fuel were left to 
them, and the comparative abundance of One-Ton 
Camp was eleven miles away. This distance that is 
only a short breath to the speeding motorist on a con¬ 
crete road in comfortable America was half the world 
away to those weary men staggering over the Barrier 
Ice. 

The last camp was pitched in the midst of a blizzard 
that made further travel impossible. For ten days it 
raged, and the men lay in their little tent and waited. 
It was death to take to the trail and death if they 
stayed. Probably toward the end they could hardly 
have moved had the weather been the best that could 
have been hoped. 

The date of the last entry was March 29: “Every 
day we have been ready to start for our depot eleven 
miles away, but outside the door of the tent it remains 
a scene of whirling drift. I do not think we can hope 


Scott of the Antarctic 135 

for any better things now.” It was the commander’s 
farewell. Then he wrote his Message to the Public. 
In this he summarized the causes of failure—snow, 
cold, head-wind: “We are weak, writing is difficult, 
but for my own sake I do not regret this journey, 
which has shown that Englishmen can endure hard¬ 
ships, help one another, and meet death with as great 
a fortitude as ever in the past. Had we lived I should 
have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, 
and courage of my companions, which would have 
stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough 
notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale, but surely, 
surely, a great rich country like ours will see that 
those who are dependent upon us are properly pro¬ 
vided for.” 

Cherry-Gerrard had waited with his dog teams at 
One-Ton Camp from March 4 to 10, ready to lift 
them back to the base camp. He waited beyond the 
scheduled time, waited till it was too late to get the 
Terra Nova clear before the ice pack closed in for 
another winter, waited till he had barely food enough 
to see him and his animals through to Cape Evans. 
Then he turned northward again, barely in time to 
get through himself. 

One effort was made by a party from the base camp 
to find them before the long winter shut down. Then 
there was nothing for the survivors to do but wait till 
the return of the sun gave them leave to travel again. 
It was not until October 30 that Dr. Atkinson was 
able to set out from Hut Point for his sad hunt along 
the Polar trail. On November 12 they caught sight 


136 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

of the little tent still standing on the wide stretch of 
frozen snow. It had guarded the sleepers faithfully 
through the long night. 

Lieut. Wright, a Canadian from Toronto, was the 
first to pull the flap aside and look in. The three men 
were lying as though asleep. Scott, evidently the last 
to die, was outside his sleeping bag. Dr. Wilson and 
Lieut. Bowers were in their bags carefully covered up. 
Their position indicated that after his comrades died 
Scott had crawled to them and drawn the coverings 
over them. Then he had gone back and died half 
sitting with his back against the tent pole as though to 
face the Great Intruder that he knew was coming. His 
journal lay by his side with its curt record of struggle, 
victory, and defeat. There was no moan in all its 
scribbled pages, merely the plain record of what they 
had endured and how they had come to the end, and 
a calm acceptance of the verdict. And for this reason 
it was all the more a record of the fact that English¬ 
men could “meet death with as great a fortitude as 
ever in the past.” 

Two years later thousands of their fellow-country¬ 
men were to write their names on the same record in 
Flanders and in France, but not all the brave blood 
that was spilled there can wipe out the memory of 
what these men did in the Antarctic. 

The men of the rescue party buried their bodies 
under a cairn of snow and ice, and fixed at the top of 
it two skis in the shape of a cross. On one of them 
was written this inscription: “To seek, to strive, to 
find, and not to yield.” A fruitless search was made 


137 


Scott of the Antarctic 

along the back trail for the body of Captain Oates. 
The Barrier Ice still holds the secret of his burial 
place. Near where they calculated he must have gone 
out to his death they built a cairn and gave it this 
epitaph: “Hereabouts died a very gallant gentleman.” 

This tale of effort and tragic success—for they did 
succeed—gives the final answer to those feeble souls 
who ask “What’s the use of polar exploration?” If 
your mind is intent only on the balance sheet side of 
life, if you spell success in terms of profit and loss, 
if you value comfort above striving and the gain be¬ 
yond the game, then the answer to you is, “There is 
no use.” But if the vision of Scott and his men, lost 
and hopeless, still toiling through the horror of the 
Antarctic, calm in their courage, with no regret or com¬ 
plaint, lifts your head a little higher and quickens the 
beat of your pulse a trifle, you have found in your own 
heart the all-sufficient answer. “To seek, to strive, to 
find, and not to yield.” No finer epitaph could be 
written for a brave man and his brave comrades. 


VIII 


RAJAH BROOKE OF SARAWAK 

Englishmen have ruled alien races in all sorts of 
ways and under all sorts of titles. So far as the 
records show, however, there is only one case of an 
Englishman bearing the title of Rajah by right of 
native selection and with full power of transmission 
to his next of blood. That man is James Brooke, 
Rajah of Sarawak. Sarawak is now a British depend¬ 
ency, but the Brookes still bear the title. They have 
earned it, for had it not been for the first Brooke, 
Sarawak would in all likelihood be Dutch today instead 
of British. 

The story of that first Brooke is almost ancient his¬ 
tory now, so fast time runs, but the East remembers 
better than the West. And it will be long before the 
children and children’s children of the men who fought 
against and under him forget him. 

From his earliest days James Brooke had the sea in 
his blood. Even as a schoolboy he was a skillful sailor, 
and at Norwich Grammar School he saved another 
boy from drowning under a capsized boat by diving 
after him and dragging his senseless body out. He 
was restless at home and soon left school of his own 
accord. His father was in the service of the East 

138 


139 


Rajah Brooke of Sarawak 

India Company, and the youngster was made an En¬ 
sign in Bengal at the age of sixteen. His career as a 
subordinate in any capacity was bound to be brief. 
He was wounded in action in the Burmese war of 1825 
and resigned from the service in 1831 at the age of 
twenty-eight. 

From that date begins his career as a free lance in 
a troubled world. In fact, it began before he reached 
England after leaving the East India Company. Sail¬ 
ings from the East were irregular in those days, and 
he went to the Chinese port of Canton to get passage 
home in a tea clipper. The Chinese hated all Euro¬ 
peans and there were frequent clashes between the 
men of the two races. The Viceroy at Canton had 
forbidden white women to enter the port and sought 
to expel the only one resident there. In revenge Brooke 
and two or three companions, equally reckless, dis¬ 
guised themselves as Chinese and entered the native 
city during the Feast of Lanterns, a thing that was 
forbidden to all foreigners. It was a daredevil act 
without reason or justification. Once in the forbidden 
area they threw off their disguises and broke some of 
the sacred lanterns. In the riot that followed they 
were fortunate to escape with their lives. 

This episode was only a gesture. He still had no 
notion of where his future was to lie. Back in Eng¬ 
land, he thought of many things, none of them par¬ 
ticularly useful or attractive to the average man. One 
of his plans was for a whaling trip to Greenland. 
Another was to land him as a settler in Van Diemen’s 
Land, south of Australia, then a savage wilderness. 


140 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

His experiences in the East suggested also a privateer¬ 
ing cruise against the Dutch in the East Indies. At 
no time was he friendly to the thrifty Hollander as a 
colonist or trader. 

Later in life, he said of himself that his feet were 
never cheerful and buoyant except at sea. After 
knocking about England for a time, meditating many^ 
wild adventures, but perpetrating none, he persuaded 
his father to help him buy and outfit the Findlay^ a| 
two-hundred-and-ninety-ton schooner. In these days 
when a vessel of a thousand tons is little more than a 
toy in freight carrying, the idea of loading cargo on 
such a tiny craft is not much better than a joke. But 
that was what Brooke did. He sailed for the East in 
1834. Of course the voyage was a failure, not so much 
because of the size of the vessel but for the reason 
that Brooke was no trader. All that he gained was a 
brief satisfaction of his hunger for the sea and the 
East. 

A year later his father died and he came into an 
inheritance of thirty thousand pounds sterling. That 
was something of a fortune then, and with this amount 
a man might hope to conquer at least enough of the 
world to give himself elbow-room. Here was Brooke’s 
big chance, and he was not slow in seizing it. The 
next schooner he bought was even smaller than the 
Findlay, the Royalist, 142 tons. She carried a crew 
of twenty men. With this cockle shell and his hand¬ 
ful of men Brooke planned to upset the Dutch power 
in Borneo and plant the English flag there. 

At that time the Dutch were the only European 


141 


Rajah Brooke of Sarawak 

nation with a firm foothold in this great island lying 
across the Equator to the east of the Malay Peninsula 
and Sumatra. It is the second largest island in the 
world, ranking next to Australia, with a coast line 
nearly six thousand miles in extent. The Dutch grip 
was none too firm in Brooke’s time, and the real rulers 
of the island were the pirates who raided foreigners 
and natives alike. Head-hunting was a logical Incident 
of all native wars, and between times ambitious young 
men practised it privately to prove their courage and 
skill. The scale of life was low, and the native rulers 
kept their hold largely through ability to lead their 
people in raids on Chinese traders or helpless jungle 
villages. The Sea Dyaks were the most able and war¬ 
like of them all. The ruling religion was Moham¬ 
medan, and is still for the matter of that. There was 
some talk of gold deposits in various parts of the 
island, but the principal product was antimony, a sub¬ 
stance much valued as a metal alloy and occasionally 
used in medicine. 

Brooke’s voyage to the east was a leisurely one. He 
ran across to the coast of Brazil to touch at Rio 
Janeiro, then headed eastward around the Cape of 
Good Hope. At Singapore he picked up eight natives 
for his crew. These were Orang-Lauts (Men of the 
Sea) as distinguished from the Orang-Utans (Men of 
the Woods). Here he heard more talk of the anti¬ 
mony mines of Sarawak, the province lying along the 
northwestern coast of Borneo. He learned also that 
the Rajah of Sarawak was unfriendly to the Dutch. 
This fitted in admirably with Brooke’s own ideas and 


142 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

he decided to have a look. It was in August, 1839, 
that the Royalist sailed up the Sarawak River and 
dropped anchor off Kuching, the Rajah’s capital. The 
ruling Rajah was a young man, Muda Hassim, a futile 
person, surrounded by a group of bloodthirsty uncles 
who were constantly plotting his death that they might 
fight each other for control. His greatest safeguard 
was their mutual distrust. 

The Rajah received Brooke in royal state, in his 
bamboo palace supported on stakes. But apparently 
it was a dignified and impressive ceremony for all that. 
Hassim was anxious to know all about the relative 
strength of the English and Dutch. Which was the 
cat and which the rat? Brooke pretended to consider 
and gave it as his profound conclusion that England 
was really the cat. There was a return call on board 
the Royalist and a call by Brooke on Mohammed, the 
brother of the Rajah. Mohammed was lazy and kept 
the Englishman waiting. Brooke stamped on the floor 
and sent word to his unmannerly host that if he did 
not come forth his guest would come and get him. 
Mohammed promptly appeared, much frightened and 
stammering apologies, backed though he was by a 
hundred men to Brooke’s one. 

There was a war going on in the interior of Sarawak 
and Brooke questioned the Rajah about it. Hassim 
waved the question aside. “Merely child’s play,” he 
said. It was uncertain whether this was the truth or a 
part of the Rajah’s plan to use his English visitor to 
demonstrate his own power. However, Brooke de¬ 
termined to see something of the country and satisfy 


143 


Rajah Brooke of Sarawak 

himself as to conditions. Accordingly he took five 
men in his ship’s long boat, with a Malay guide, and 
set out, accompanied by Illudren, a subordinate official, 
in a native boat. The first day was eighteen hours 
down the Sarawak to the sea and up another river, the 
Samarahan, to Samarahan village. This was the end 
of the trip. Illudren developed nervousness and in¬ 
sisted that they turn back. Then there was a trip up 
another river, the Lundu, to Si Tudong. This was 
Brooke’s first sight of a purely Dyak village, Kuching 
being mixed Malay, Chinese, and other races. The 
four hundred inhabitants of Si Tudong lived in a 
single house nearly six hundred feet long. In front 
was a terrace of bamboo fifty feet broad where the 
people, the pigs, the dogs, and the fowls of the village 
mixed together. The skulls hanging from the ceiling 
in the chief’s room proved that he was in the land of 
the head-hunters at last. Again it was Illudren who 
compelled a return to Kuching. 

Hassim had been thinking things over in the mean¬ 
while and had concluded that he could find both security 
and profit in an arrangement with Brooke. He was 
willing to trade with the merchants of Singapore, 
especially since this would annoy the Dutch, and he 
conferred on Brooke the title of Tuan Besar—Great 
Sir. This was good enough for a first trip. The 
Royalist headed for Singapore, but on the way they 
fell in with pirates, and Brooke met the pirate chief at 
Sadong River—“Stout and resolute looking, and a 
most polite demeanor, as oily-tongued a cutthroat as a 
gentleman could wish to associate with.” 


144 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

He had broken the ice in Sarawak. Now he was 
content to leave the Rajah to think things over and, 
incidentally, to struggle with his “child’s play” war. 
In the meantime Brooke cruised among the Celebes 
east of Borneo. It was pleasant going, hunting, col¬ 
lecting specimens of all kinds, entertaining native 
princes and being entertained by them, but it was only 
a detour from his main highway. 

It was nearly a year from the time of his first visit 
that he landed back at Kuching. The war was still 
on and the Rajah’s forces seemed to be making little 
headway. Brooke went out two or three times to see 
the campaign and found little to observe. The Ma¬ 
lay’s idea of organized warfare was to lie in safety in 
entrenchments or behind a bamboo stockade and fire 
their guns in the air at intervals, filling in the time with 
gong beating, abuse of the enemy, and prayer. On 
one occasion a force advancing in what was to be com¬ 
plete quiet revealed their presence to the enemy by the 
loudness of their prayers. In the firing that followed 
one man was killed, whereupon his fellows squatted 
down in the tall grass and said their prayers more 
loudly than ever. After which they retreated rapidly. 
At another time a white flag was hoisted and a con¬ 
ference was proposed. The rebels consented, where¬ 
upon the proposers feared a trap and decided that it 
was unsafe to sit down with such a treacherous foe. 
Finally Brooke lost patience and took twelve members 
of his crew and one native and charged the rebels in 
the open. The latter broke and ran at the first shock, 
and the war was over. This was the final argument 


145 


Rajah Brooke of Sarawak 

with the Rajah. A man who in half an hour could 
end a rebellion against which he had been unable to 
make head in over four years, was a good man to have 
on his side. 

The first step was only a trade agreement, although 
Hassim talked grandly about the headship of the gov¬ 
ernment and the control of the country. One of his 
difficulties was with the relatives and councillors who 
surrounded him and saw their power diminishing as 
the star of the Englishman rose. Brooke had one 
sure native. Si Tundo, who had charged with him 
against the rebels. I'he others were notable chiefly 
for the fairness of their speech and the Uncertainty of 
their conduct. While Brooke was absent at Singapore 
buying another schooner for trading with the island 
Si Tundo was treacherously killed. When Brooke re¬ 
turned he found that nothing had been done of what 
had been promised, no house had been built, no ware¬ 
house provided, and only one small cargo of antimony 
was on hand. 

When the new schooner, the Swift, came in with 
her cargo of trade goods the Rajah craftily got his 
hands on the cargo and then waited for Brooke to 
make the next move. In the meantime Brooke learned 
that one Makota, “a most mild and gentlemanly ras¬ 
cal,” had a hold on the Rajah and would not permit 
the ratifying of the agreement with Brooke. At this 
Brooke laid the Ro^yalist broadside on to the royal 
palace, and went ashore to demand the punishment of 
Makota. The latter saw the point of this argument 
and abandoned the field. Freed of the influence of his 


146 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

native advisers, the Rajah turned over the government 
of Sarawak to Brooke. This was in September, 1841. 
At the time it happened this step was not so radical as 
it appears at this distance. Sarawak was bankrupt, and 
the people were poverty-stricken and restless. The 
power of the Rajah hardly extended beyond his own 
palace and was uncertain even there. In turning over 
the government to Brooke he freed his shoulders of a 
painful burden and gained for himself the promise 
of an income from the revenues of Sarawak if Brooke 
could bring order to that troubled State. 

There was plenty of trouble for the new Rajah, but 
his first official act was to release the wives of rebels 
held as hostages. This was his own summary of his 
new kingdom: “Where for the last ten years there 
has been no government—where intrigue and plunder 
form the occupation of all the higher classes—where 
for a poor man to possess anything beyond his clothes 
is a crime—where lying is a virtue, religion dead, and 
where cheating is so common I believe a Borneon would 
rather cheat himself than forbear.” The greatest 
problem was with the pirates. Piracy was an honor¬ 
able calling through all these waters, and sons followed 
in the footsteps of their fathers. Some of the chiefs 
admitted that it was not what it had been in the good 
old days before British men of war had begun to inter¬ 
fere, but it was still the best profession for an ambi¬ 
tious man who liked active work with a chance of 
advancement. The Hill Dyaks were in wretched state. 
Raided by pirates and robbed by those who pretended 


Rajah Brooke of Sarawak 147 

to protect them, it mattered little to them which side 
won. 

Brooke held court in Kuching Oriental fashion, and 
announced a simple code of laws mainly designed to 
safeguard life and property. A Sakarran chief pro¬ 
tested that old customs sanctified by long use could not 
so easily be thrown aside. “You will give me, your 
friend, leave to steal a few heads occasionally.” Other 
chiefs begged that they be permitted to hunt heads 
somewhere —a government game preserve in other 
words. Brooke was obdurate. Piracy and head-hunt¬ 
ing must stop. Those who wished to collect heads 
were advised to go to Singapore and take the heads of 
the English there. There were many Chinese in the 
country who alternately oppressed the poorer and were 
oppressed by the higher classes. One pirate chief who 
was caught redhanded in a raid on a Chinese settle¬ 
ment expressed his astonishment at the new regime: 
“What? Am I to be put to death for killing only a 
few Chinamen!” 

Some of the tribes were slow in acknowledging the 
headship of Brooke. After considerable delay the 
Sultan of Borneo confirmed the selection, and Hassim 
called the chiefs together at Kuching to announce the 
Sultan’s decision. According to the custom, dissenters 
were challenged to declare their opposition. Makota, 
the mild and gentlemanly rascal, was present as was 
his right, and there was a dramatic scene when the 
brothers of Hassim drew their krises and swords and 
danced around him, daring him to speak. Again Ma- 


148 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

kota saw the point and held his peace. Thus was 
Brooke finally placed in his insecure saddle. 

The habit of piracy that had been fixed for genera¬ 
tions, if not centuries, was hard to break. Early in 
Brooke’s reign H. M. S. Dido visited Kuching under 
the command of his friend. Captain, afterwards Ad¬ 
miral, Keppel. Brooke was on his way up the river 
accompanied by the boats of the Dido filled with armed 
men. Suddenly from the cover of the wooded banks 
a fleet of prahus darted out to attack them. Brooke 
tried to warn them back, but it was of no use, and the 
volley from the muskets in the British boats killed 
several of the attackers, among them “an old, wealthy, 
and respectable friend of Brooke’s.” It was appar¬ 
ently an amateur effort purely. The pirate blood was 
still strong in them and they had thought to seize a 
chance for a quick turn in the business of looting. 

More than once the friendly Dido came to the aid 
of Brooke in his war with the pirates. One of the 
most pestiferous strongholds, that of the Sarebas, was 
wiped out. Maps and sailing directions were vague 
and imperfect, which added the charm of uncertainty 
to the general dangers of these enterprises. After¬ 
wards Captain Keppel said that in one of his expedi¬ 
tions, according to the best Admiralty charts, the Dido 
had sailed over eighty miles of land and the tops of 
high mountains. On one of her cruises she brought to 
Sarawak a midshipman named Charles Johnson, the 
nephew of Brooke, later to be one of the Rajah’s most 
trusted lieutenants under the title of Tuan Muda, and 
eventually his successor. 


149 


Rajah Brooke of Sarawak 

Naturally there could not be so much fighting with¬ 
out some echo of it getting back to England and there 
were many unpleasant rumors. Brooke was accused of 
oppressing the natives, of paying a bounty for the 
heads of his enemies, of levying exorbitant taxes, and 
enriching himself at the expense of the people he 
governed. 

Brooke stated his own attitude simply and plainly. 
“I am enabled to dispense happiness and peace to many 
• thousand persons. I stand alone; I appeal for assist¬ 
ance and gain none; I have struggled for four years, 
bearing my life in my hands. I hold a commanding 
position and influence over the natives; I feel it is 
my paramount duty to gain protection and some power. 
I state it in so many plain words, and if, after all, I 
am left to my own resources the fault of failure is not 
with me.” 

Soon after his campaign against the pirates began 
to be effective, Brooke had assurance of the fruit that 
often falls to the part of the white man dealing with 
savage races, his fiercest enemies became his most 
devoted friends. At one time a group of friendly 
datus, as the smaller chiefs were called, was encamped 
with their men across the river from Kuching when 
the Rajah was entertaining European guests. The 
English were at dinner in the Rajah’s house when 
Lingire, a Dyak chief, landed with eighty men and 
announced that he had come for the white Rajah’s 
head. Marching into the palace they squatted around 
the table waiting for the signal to attack. Brooke 
assured his guests that there was no danger, and calling 


150 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

a servant who understood English gave him a message 
to the friendly datus across the river. Lingire let him 
pass, thinking that the order had to do with the serving 
of dinner. In a few minutes Datu Tumangong, a 
brave old pirate who in his day had raided within the 
sight of Singapore, the chief European settlement in 
the Far East, came striding in at the head of thirty 
men. Lingire still showed fight till another datu ap¬ 
peared at the head of forty more. This was too much 
like a fair fight and Lingire faded from the scene, 
reappearing later as a firm friend and follower of 
Brooke. 

Appeals to the Sultan of the Island to help suppress 
the pirates were of no avail. After one such effort 
Brooke said of that monarch: “He has the head of 
an idiot and the heart of a pirate.” Nevertheless, 
progress was made, slowly and with infinite toil and 
danger. The forces of order were being organized, 
and peace was dawning in the land. In 1845, four 
years after Brooke assumed the title, Kuching was four 
times its former size. There was plenty of food in 
a land where famine had always been just around the 
corner. A hundred trading vessels entered Sarawak 
River in one month where formerly one a month was 
a rare sight. 

It was not all fighting in Sarawak. Brooke soon 
found that the job of Rajah carried with it many duties 
that were not at first contemplated. For instance, the 
case of a man-eating crocodile in one of the rivers near 
Kuching was brought before him. The reptile was 
not without his advocates. These argued that the 


151 


Rajah Brooke of Sarawak 

crocodile was the Rajah among animals and as such 
was entitled to be treated with honor, even though it 
might be necessary to kill him. The opposition recog¬ 
nized the force of this argument, but protested that 
to follow out this plan would be to set a bad example 
to the other crocodiles who would insist on similar 
consideration. 

Brooke weighed all the arguments gravely and then 
gave it as his profound conclusion that human beings, 
whether Rajahs or not, were of more importance than 
crocodiles, and therefore this particular specimen 
should be killed without honor. And it was so ordered 
and done. 

Then there was the case of Makota who had op¬ 
posed him before his elevation to the position of Rajah 
and had attempted to undermine him afterwards. That 
old intriguer had fallen on evil days now that his 
source of income had been destroyed. He besought 
Brooke to lend him two thousand reals. No. One 
thousand? No. One Hundred? No. Fifty? No. 
Five? Still no. The discouraged Makota borrowed 
three reals from one of the staff on his way out from 
his audience with the Rajah. 

As Brooke’s power increased, so also did his ene¬ 
mies at home and abroad. Early in 1846 a thing hap¬ 
pened at Brune, the Sultan’s capital, that threatened 
not only immediate consequences of a serious character, 
but also was destined to have long echoes. Muda 
Hassim, after turning over the government to Brooke, 
had gone to Brune to be near his relative, the Sultan. 


152 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

Unfortunately the latter did not share his liking for 
the English. 

At the instigation of the Sultan, Hassim killed 
Brooke’s faithful friend, Budredeen, and all the mem¬ 
bers of the royal family who were partial to Brooke. 
The news reached Brooke by a messenger from Budre¬ 
deen. The latter was barricaded in his house with the 
messenger and two women who were the only members 
of his family who had remained faithful to him. He 
wrote what he knew was his farewell letter to his 
friend, enclosed with it the signet ring that Brooke 
had given him as a token of friendship, and the mes¬ 
senger dropped through the floor into the water under 
the house. Then Budredeen set a match to a keg of 
powder and blew himself and the two women to bits. 
In this last message the old man begged Brooke never 
to forget him and to tell the Queen of England how 
he died. 

Things looked black at Kuching, and the only re¬ 
course was to strike straight at Brune. Singapore sent 
an English squadron, and late in the year Brooke car¬ 
ried the war to the Sultan. That worthy declined to 
wait and took to the jungle before the ships appeared 
in the river off his palace. It was a flurry only so far 
as Borneo was concerned, but it was to have results 
in far-away England. There was a little interlude 
of piracy near Kuching. The Sakarrans and Sarebus, 
long accustomed to bursts of piracy, took advantage of 
the Rajah’s absence to go mildly on the warpath. 
Brooke levied a fine of one hundred jars and a hundred 
captives and that little matter was settled. The fine 


153 


Rajah Brooke of Sarawak 

was the more painful of the two inasmuch as the favor¬ 
ite Dyak investments were jars, gongs, and swivel 
cannon. It was at the end of this year that the British 
government took over the island of Labuan as a British 
dependency. This lay off the coast of Sarawak and 
was an important factor in the control of the larger 
island. 

The greater part of the year following this was 
spent in England, and here Brooke felt for the first 
time the full force of the opposition that was growing 
against him at home. It is a waste of space to go into 
it now. Much of it was of the type that would be 
called anti-imperialistic in these days. Brooke was 
accused of oppression, extortion, cruelty, and murder. 
He was challenged to prove that the pirates he had 
fought on the Sakarran and the Sarebus were really 
pirates and not peaceful natives and traders. It can 
be dismissed with the simple statement that no one who 
knew Borneo had any doubt of the facts and of the 
justice of Brooke’s position. 

His year at home was not all controversial. The 
Queen received him at Windsor, Oxford gave him an 
honorary degree, the freedom of the City of London 
was conferred on him, and many societies did him 
honor. The crowning touch was his recognition by the 
government in the form of an appointment as governor 
of Labuan, Consul General of Borneo, and Commis¬ 
sioner of the native states. When he went back to 
Sarawak, he carried with him for the first time a flag 
of the little country, a red and purple cross from 
Brooke’s armorial shield on a yellow field, yellow being 


154 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

the royal color of Borneo. With him went also a 
nephew, John Brooke Johnson, who took the surname 
of Brooke, and who will be hereafter known as Captain 
Brooke. 

The return to Sarawak in 1849 was signalized by a 
big fight in the Batang Lupar River. Brooke’s party, 
accompanied by boats from a British squadron and a 
paddle-wheel steamer, ran foul of a pirate fleet of 150 
boats returning from a raid loaded down with loot and 
prisoners. In the fight that followed, five hundred of 
the pirates were killed and the rest took refuge in the 
jungle along the bank. So the process of pacifying 
went on. Two tribes that had held off sent messengers 
that they wanted to be good and especially asked 
Brooke that he build a fort for their protection. This 
Brooke did and sent a young Englishman, Arthur 
Brereton, to take command. 

Here is the first evidence of a factor that had been 
gradually growing in Brooke’s favor. For the first 
time he was able to say that he had around him a staff 
of able, enthusiastic, courageous young men of his own 
race. His two nephews were with him, Charles John¬ 
son and his brother, the new Captain Brooke. Brereton 
was another, and more were coming all the time. The 
pay was small and the work was hard and usually dan¬ 
gerous, but they stuck. For the most part they gave 
up their posts only with their lives. Miss Gertrude 
Jacob, one of the biographers of the Rajah, whose 
uncle had been his friend and guest at Kuching, said 
of them: “And thus there gathered one by one a 
brotherhood that caught its inspiration from its leader, 


155 


Rajah Brooke of Sarawak 

and bore with hard work, constant exposure to a trying 
climate, great and long continued isolation, discom¬ 
forts innumerable, and a pay which, never high, fluc¬ 
tuated with the fortunes of the country.” 

One thing that cheered Brooke’s heart was the rec¬ 
ognition of his government by the United States which 
addressed him as the “Ruler of the State of Sarawak” 
and sent an envoy to Kuching to congratulate him on 
the suppression of piracy. Brooke’s own attitude can 
be summed up in his phrase: “A slipshod policy is in 
the end a bloody and cruel one.” 

On his way back to Kuching from Singapore he was 
taken ill with smallpox and nearly died. While he lay 
burning with fever and in his delirium fighting by the 
side of Simon de Montfort on the field of Evesham, 
Rentap, a Sakarran chief and a jealous guardian of the 
old customs—especially piracy—attacked Brereton’s 
post and killed Lee, his second in command. Gassin, 
a friendly chief—“silly, dear old Gassin,” as Brooke 
called him—burning to avenge this outrage, insisted 
on leading the attack on “Grandfather” Rentap’s 
stronghold. The result was failure, and Rentap sent 
guides and provisions to enable his enemy to get back 
to their own country. Charles Johnson, whom the 
Dyaks had kept in the rear, reports: “The Dyaks said 
birds and dreams had been ‘angat’ (hot) consequently 
bad; the Malays (Sarawak) said if they had only been 
there, the result would have been different; and the 
Europeans said—nothing.” 

Another storm center was Muka, on the borders of 
Sarawak. Ursut, the ruler of the district, quarreled 


156 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

with his cousin Matusen, and Matusen fled for his life. 
Later the affair was patched up and Matusen was 
allowed to return on his promise of good behavior. 
This held till he saw a chance to square accounts with 
his cousin, whereupon he killed him and his women 
and children. War threatened, and the women and 
children of Matusen fled to Kuching for protection 
under Brooke. 

Brooke had no part in this civil war, but he could 
not tolerate a conflagration on his borders. The real 
center of the disturbance seemed to him to be the Sul¬ 
tan’s palace in Brune and he went thither. The Sultan 
was apparently friendly and assured him that he would 
do everything in his power to bring order at Muka. 
His chief advisor, Brooke’s old enemy Makota, was 
absent, however, and Brooke feared the worst. After 
his departure from Brune he learned that Makota was 
raiding in Muka by the Sultan’s orders. Matusen was 
beaten and fled to Kuching to take shelter under the 
white man, and Charles Johnson was sent to Muka to 
do the job the Sultan had promised to do. 

Brooke’s Dyaks were gradually being whipped into 
shape as a fighting force, but the old desires died hard. 
At Muka, Johnson had constant trouble with his men 
who could not understand a victory without heads to 
show for it. To them the attitude of Brooke and his 
lieutenants was like that of a stern father who would 
deny his good children sugar-plums. One of Brooke’s 
old Malays, Abang Aing, was Johnson’s right-hand 
man at Muka. It was on him that the brunt of the 
Dyak pleadings fell. His final word was usually con- 


157 


Rajah Brooke of Sarawak 

vincing. “Well, you know I have warned you, and 
if you attempt anything of the sort, we have arms, 
powder, and shot; therefore do as you think proper.” 
This was language they could understand. 

Then there was the case of Si Jannah who was fined 
twelve rusa jars, equivalent to about two hundred 
pounds sterling, for a particularly atrocious murder. 
Hitherto the highest fine for this crime had been about 
eight pounds. This added another argument to Abang 
Aing’s stock: “Remember Jannah’s twelve jars, the 
fine for killing; and if you cannot pay, your life will 
have to answer.” 

After Brooke’s visit to England and his appoint¬ 
ment to official position in Borneo he had hoped that 
the way was open for a closer bond with the mother 
country. Apparently, however, the officials in London 
were still unable to recognize piracy so far away, and 
instead of help there came renewed criticism, and 
finally an order for a Commission of Inquiry at Singa¬ 
pore to look into his campaigns against the pirates. At 
the same time the government withdrew his appoint¬ 
ment as Consul-General and Governor of Labuan, ancl 
informed him that they were sending out his successor. 
The same mail brought information that the British 
government regarded Sarawak as a dependency of the 
Sultan and subject to orders from Brune. This was 
the last straw. Brooke’s native councillors at Kuching 
could see nothing but evil to come from Brune. They 
had fought the Sultan and they would do it again be¬ 
fore they would submit to his rule. “Since then they 
had chgsen Mr. Brooke to be their king. They had 


158 Boys* Own Book of ^Adventurers 

chosen him and they would support him, for the bond 
between them ‘was as close as the skin to their flesh.’ ” 

This action of his own country seemed to the Rajah 
the last straw. Now Sarawak stood alone. The prov¬ 
ince was prosperous and apparently contented, while 
Brune, the center of the Sultan’s personal domains, was 
wretched and restless. The Sultan preserved his power 
only by giving free rein to his rebellious piratical and 
head-hunting vassals. 

At this point a disaster befell that was almost the 
last that could have been anticipated. For years the 
gold-workings in Sarawak and most of the antimony 
mines had been under the control of the Chinese. 
These were organized in close guilds, or shanzis. One 
of these shanzis had been gathering its members in and 
around Kuching until there were nearly four thousand 
Chinese at hand. At the same time the smuggling and 
use of opium had increased markedly and the respon¬ 
sibility was finally traced to the Chinese, and they 
were ordered to discontinue their smuggling opera¬ 
tions. Their answer was an armed rising at night. 
The blow was so unexpected that Brooke and his 
friends were caught utterly unprepared. Four Euro¬ 
peans were killed and Brooke escaped only by swim¬ 
ming the river and taking refuge among the Malays 
on the other side. The traders and missionaries were 
spared because of the Chinese belief that in that way 
they could escape complications with England. It was 
the logical fruit of England’s attitude toward the 
Rajah. 

The long fight seemed lost. The town was in the 


159 


Rajah Bi'ooke of Sarawak 

hands of the Chinese, the palace was in ashes, and the 
faithful Charles Johnson was far away among the 
Sakarrans. It was to these fierce people, his old ene¬ 
mies the Sea Dyaks, pirates and head-hunters, that 
Brooke turned in his extremity. But help was nearer 
than he thought. On the way down the river to the 
sea he met an English steamer on her way up. When 
she appeared off Kuching with the Rajah it was the 
turn of the Chinese to flee in panic. So swift was the 
change that one man from whose back Brooke shot 
the pack that he was carrying did not even stop to pick 
up his loot. 

In the meantime the bad news had traveled to John¬ 
son among the Sakarrans. In the middle of the night 
he was awakened by the message, “Tuan, the news is 
sorrowful. The Rajah is killed and all the Europeans 
driven from the capital.” The grim old sea-fighters 
assembled before the dawn and awaited the word, 
glad of a chance to fight in a legitimate war under the 
white captain. Johnson was staggering and nearly 
blind with fever, but when he asked them to choose 
their leader and promise implicit obedience to him, he 
was the man they named. Fortunately the Dyaks were 
cheated out of their fight, for when they reached 
Kuching they found the British steamer there and the 
Rajah in control again. 

The flurry brought up afresh the question of British 
influence. Lord Derby was then Prime Minister of 
England. He showered Brooke with compliments, 
but, when it came to the point, talked gravely of entan¬ 
glements and precedents and would do nothing. In 


160 


Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

one of his letters the Rajah lashed out with a phrase 
that came straight out of his hard experience: “No 
great nation ever stood in a neutral position without 
the loss of respect and influence.” 

The Rajah was now approaching the end of his long 
service in Sarawak. His two nephews had been trained 
under his own eye, and were apparently competent to 
handle affairs. In 1859 he bought a small estate in 
England to which he gave the name of Burrator. It 
was in the Devon on the edge of Dartmoor. Here he 
planned to end his days where he could look out across 
the wide sweep of the downs that Meredith the novel¬ 
ist has likened to a greyhound running. Here his 
friends could visit him and he could tell over to them 
the tale of his wild days in Sarawak. He was hardly 
settled in this new home when the news from the East 
became disquieting. Captain Brooke was acting head 
in the absence of the Rajah, and his moody tempera¬ 
ment, intensified by the death of his wife, unfitted him 
for dealing with the troublesome elements of that land 
where trouble grew like weeds in the jungle. Feverish 
Muka was still running a temperature, although Ma- 
kota had been drowned for his sins. The capable 
Charles Johnson was on the scene of action with a 
price on his head of three hundred reals. 

A rumor ran through the province that a general 
massacre of all Europeans had been ordered. The 
storm center seemed to be Brune, but it was not pos¬ 
sible to place it definitely till the messenger was caught 
and proved to be an impostor. Captain Brooke had 
left for England, and all the burden fell on Charles 


Rajah Brooke of Sarawak 161 

Johnson. The capture of the messenger from Brune 
did not quench the flames. Murmurs of discontent 
still ran through the country, and the Rajah prepared 
to return to take up his old burden. A group of friends 
bought the steamer Rainbow and presented her to him, 
and he sailed for Sarawak again in 1860, his dream 
of a peaceful old age shattered almost at its beginning. 

In the meantime, events were moving rapidly in 
Sarawak. Fox and Steele, two Englishmen in charge 
at Kanowit, the key to the Muka district, were killed, 
and rebellion blazed up. This time the leader was 
Massahore, an old firebrand and trouble-maker. He 
claimed to be a descendant of Mohammed and as¬ 
sured his people that he bore a charmed life against 
the bullets of the white men. It was he who had 
offered a pension of three hundred reals to whomever 
would bring him the head of Charles Johnson. 

Some of the facts about Massahore’s share in the 
plot did not come out until after the revolt had been 
crushed. When Johnson took command of the opera¬ 
tions to punish the murderers of Fox and Steele, Mas¬ 
sahore appeared on board his boat at Serikei and 
offered his help. Johnson was distrustful and refused. 
“So my course was to meet the Sherip (Massahore) 
in a friendly manner without a shadow of suspicion on 
my brow, and as he sat on one chair, I sat on another 
within a foot of him. He had his sword, I had mine. 
Both had equally sharpened edges.” Afterwards John¬ 
son said of these days: “I felt, while in this state, no 
more fear of danger or death than of washing my 
hands in the morning. A man with arms constantly 


162 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

about him and death staring him in the face soon 
loses the sensation of what people improperly style 
nervousness.” 

In the end it was the faithful natives who crushed 
the revolt and punished the murderers. Dyaks from 
the Kanowit River who had been severely punished 
by Brooke only three years before came and placed 
themselves at Johnson’s orders. He answered by im¬ 
posing the hardest test that could be given these jungle 
and sea fighters, to attack the rebels who were strongly 
fortified. They attacked loyally and with courage. 
Many of them died in the field, but they drove the 
rebels in rout. 

Another rebel leader was Datu Haji who had made 
the pilgrimage to Mecca and wore the green turban of 
the pilgrim. He also claimed special divine powers 
and was to lead the faithful to the sacking of Kuching. 
Again the power of Brooke’s name with the people 
whom he had befriended stood him in good stead. 
They flocked in from the neighboring villages and 
stood around armed and waiting. One of their leaders, 
the “Bandar,” called them together and made brief 
speech: “I follow the Sarawak government; there is 
business to be done. All those who are disposed to 
follow and assist me hold up their hands.” There were 
few hands that hung at their owners’ sides. Then the 
Bandar declared that the government intended to ban¬ 
ish Haji and one other, “as they are considered too 
dangerous to live among us.” Haji made one attempt 
later when he returned from his exile at Singapore 
and was ignominiously arrested by the Dutch police 


Rajah Brooke of Sarawak 163 

and jailed for inciting an outbreak in Dutch territory 
at Pontianak. 

The leaders were beginning to learn that their peo¬ 
ple would no longer follow them tamely to war and 
loot. Peace had its blessings and, on the whole, life 
was more pleasant and lasted longer under Brooke. 
It was the sign of a new day in the jungle when an 
old warrior said to the man who had been his chief: 
“You are all a parcel of babies, only fit to crawl, 
instead of standing upright.” 

The revolt was at an end. Massahore lived out his 
days in exile in Singapore, telling the stories of his old 
wars, and Haji found his end in Malacca. Years after¬ 
wards Massahore said to W. H. Read, a chronicler 
of Eastern history: “Truly I fought against the old 
Rajah, and he beat me and he exiled me; but he was 
always good and kind to my family and to my old 
mother. I was wrong, but it is too late now.” When 
he learned that Read intended to put him in one of 
his books, he said: “Don’t say I am a bad man, Tuan. 
I thought I was right to fight.” 

The smashing of Massahore was followed by the 
public installation of Captain Brooke as Rajah Muda, 
or heir apparent. This was a step that had been conx 
templated for a long time and in the old Rajah’s mind 
was his farewell to Sarawak. 

In the same year the ever busy Charles Johnson 
came to final grips with the genial old scoundrel Rentap 
in his mountain stronghold at Sadok. The roads 
thither were fit only for monkeys, and the fort stood 
at the top of a high hill that rose like the roof of a 


164 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

house. Cannon swept the approaches, and a deep 
ditch lay in front of the stockade with sharpened 
stakes fringing it. At last the Dyaks had learned to 
fight against odds. Not only did they climb the hill, 
but they dragged a twelve-pound howitzer with them. 
Rentap’s two chief allies came over at the last moment 
and helped the attacking force to haul the gun to 
position. After the fight Johnson thanked them and 
then fined them for their share in the rebellion. Ren- 
tap was smashed for good and all, and Sarawak began 
the first long term of peace that she had ever known. 

All was not well at Kuching, however. Captain 
Brooke, brooding over the death of his wife and per¬ 
haps jealous of his brother’s growing power with the 
Dyaks and Malays, demanded that he be given the 
full title of Rajah. Failing that, he defied his uncle 
and the British government and threatened insurrec¬ 
tion. Meeting the old Rajah at Singapore, he was 
contrite and promised good behavior. It lasted only 
until he reached England on leave. Here he appealed 
to some of the old political enemies of his uncle and 
talked vaguely about a suit in the English courts to 
recover his rights. 

This was the unpardonable offense. The Council 
in Sarawak declared that he had forfeited all rights 
in the country and issued against him a decree of ban¬ 
ishment. Charles Johnson was made Rajah Muda 
in his stead, adding the name of Brooke to his surname. 
This was in the fall of 1863. That done, the old 
Rajah made his real last farewell to Sarawak. From 
Singapore he wrote to his nephew who had served 


165 


Rajah Brooke of Sarawak 

him so long and faithfully: “Remember if your health 
or other cause demands my presence, send for me. I 
gave Datu Bandar a pearl ring which in concert with 
you he is to send me in token of my being wanted.” 

He died in his English home in 1868, serene in the 
knowledge that England had at length made formal 
recognition of Sarawak and appointed a resident con¬ 
sul at Kuching. Almost his last word to the Brooke 
who ruled in his place was: “Be just to my people.” 

The political storm that raged around Rajah Brooke 
has long since been stilled. Twenty years after His 
death England stepped into the opening that he had 
made at such cost of toil and danger and declared 
Sarawak a British protectorate. After nearly another 
twenty years the position of Rajah was recognized by 
King Edward, and to-day Charles Vyner Brooke, son 
of Charles Johnson Brooke and grand-nephew of the 
first Rajah, rules in Sarawak. 


IX 



L 


WALKER, THE FILIBUSTER 

The years of the late forties of the last century were 
golden years of wild dreams and high adventure. The 
Mexican war had added an empire to our territory 
and drawn men’s eyes to the possibilities of our new 
possessions. The discovery of gold in California had 
followed close on the heels of peace, and adventurers 
of all races were drawn thither for gold and for 
excitement. 

The California of that time has been called a law¬ 
less land. That was not quite the truth. It was rather 
a land where law must be made as the occasion arose. 
There was lawlessness, to be sure, but it was soon sup¬ 
pressed with a heavy hand. It would be fairer to 
characterize it as a land of adventure, even of chivalry. 
Men predominated in the population, and most of 
them were young, hardy, and daring. Quick to resent 
a real or fancied insult, the code of the duel prevailed, 
and men fought frequently on small provocation. 

To this country early in the fifties came a young 
Tennesseean, William Walker by name, destined to 
live in American chronicles as Walker the Filibuster. 
There was nothing in his family history to indicate the 
wild and checkered career that was to be his. His 

166 



The Filibuster 167 

father was a banker In a small Tennessee town and 
intended his son for the church. But that did not suit 
the boy’s own tastes, and he elected medicine Instead. 
He was educated at the University of Tennessee and 
afterwards studied In Edinburgh and In the hospitals 
of Europe. After his return to America he practiced 
for a short time In Philadelphia, but the role of a busy, 
humdrum doctor pleased him as little as had the pros¬ 
pect of the pulpit. In New Orleans he tried his hand 
at the law, soon shifting from that to a post as editorial 
writer on one of the New Orleans papers, the Crescent, 
The gold lure drew him to California, and he became 
an editorial writer on the San Francisco Herald. 

About this time an adventurer, one De Boulbon, 
dreamed a dream of an empire in the province of 
Sonora, In northwestern Mexico, that should be a 
buffer state between the United States and Mexico. 
Incidentally it was believed, correctly enough, that 
Sonora contained great wealth of precious metal. De 
Boulbon ended his brief career against a wall before 
a firing squad, but he had given Walker an Idea. What 
De Boulbon had attempted with Mexican rebels he 
would do with American riflemen. It was not hard to 
find men for any adventure, however desperate, in the 
California of that day, and In 1852 Walker landed at 
Cape San Lucas, at the lower end of Lower California. 
He was accused, and apparently with reason, of plan¬ 
ning to found an empire that should be a stronghold of 
slavery. At any rate it is true that he believed firmly 
in that institution and foresaw that It was doomed In 
the southern states. He counted, too, on Texas joining 


168 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

with his new government, and believed that there 
would be small support for a war against him on the 
part of the United States. While he waited at Cape 
San Lucas three hundred recruits joined him from 
California. They were precious scoundrels. Hardly 
had they landed when they began to plan a mutiny 
against their slender, youthful leader and a campaign 
of loot on their own account. The grey-eyed stripling 
showed them promptly that he was no tyro in the art 
of handling rough men. The leaders were court- 
martialed and shot, and there was no more talk of 
mutiny. 

But the expedition was a hopeless failure. Daily 
they were harassed by Mexicans and Indians without 
a chance for the close fighting that they craved. De¬ 
sertions wore down the force, and finally only thirty- 
five men marched behind Walker as he neared the 
border. A Mexican force cut them off, and the colonel 
in command offered safe conduct to United States soil 
to all except the leader. Walker feigned retreat and 
drew the Mexicans into an ambush and then broke 
through and across the border. 

This rang down the curtain on the Mexican drama. 
Evidently Mexico had lost all the territory she in¬ 
tended to. Farther south Nicaragua offered a promis¬ 
ing field for adventure. This was a rich country and 
an old one. Granada was founded in 1524 and Leon 
in 1610. There were many Americans already there. 
The discovery of gold in California had stimulated 
travel by way of the Isthmus. One of the favorite 
routes was by steamer up the San Juan River to Lake 


The Filibuster 


169 


Nicaragua and across the lake, thence by rail to the 
Pacific side. The steamers belonged to the Accessory 
Transit Company which was controlled by American 
capital, Commodore Vanderbilt being one of the prin¬ 
cipal shareholders. 

But the great opportunity was offered in the fact 
that Nicaragua had been blasted by civil war for nearly 
twenty years. Men had been wasted on the battlefield 
until there were several times as many women in the 
country as there were men. Both parties, known re¬ 
spectively as Legitimists and Democrats, were bank¬ 
rupt. The former controlled the Atlantic side and 
the latter the Pacific under the command of General 
Castellon. The Legitimists were commanded by Gen¬ 
eral Guardiola, a Guatemalan, who rejoiced in the 
nickname of the Butcher. 

Here was a chance for a free lance with a dream, 
and that meant a chance for Walker. There was 
nothing secret about his preparation for the expedition. 
Under the constitution of Nicaragua any citizen of 
any other American republic might become a citizen 
of Nicaragua by a mere declaration of intention. In 
addition, Walker made a contract with General Cas¬ 
tellon to furnish American colonists, with the proviso 
that such colonists should be subject to military service. 
This contract was approved by the United States Dis¬ 
trict Attorney in California and also by General Wool, 
commanding the Pacific Division of the Army. The 
brig Vesta was chartered, fifty-seven men enlisted, and 
supplies were bought. There were legal difficulties, 
however, before they were permitted to sail. A ship 


170 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

must pay her debts before she leaves port, and the 
Vesta was libeled for bills run up by her former master. 
Then there were unpaid bills for the supplies, and the 
sheriff put a man aboard, and the government cutter 
TV. L. Marcy lay alongside to make sure that she 
obeyed the law. The libels were discharged, but the 
sheriff still demanded heavy costs. Walker had spent 
his last dollar and the case was desperate. The glo¬ 
rious expedition seemed about to end in a police court 
wrangle. Walker appealed to the officers of the 
Marcy. Their duty being ended, they helped to get 
the sails out of the custody of the sheriff’s man by a 
subterfuge, the sailors of the Marcy helped to set 
them, and before the sheriff knew Ivhat was happening 
the Vesta was on her way out of the harbor with his 
man still aboard. It is pleasant to record that the 
unlucky deputy was sent back from the harbor heads 
as the Vesta squared away for her run south. 

It was in June, 1855, that Walker’s little force 
landed at Realejo, on the West Coast of Nicaragua. 
The Democrats were in a bad way, and Castellon wel¬ 
comed the reinforcements. Not so Munoz, the field 
commander of the Democrats. He and Walker were 
apparently enemies from their first meeting. Munoz’s 
first unfriendly act was the attempted division of 
Walker’s force among the native troops. Walker re¬ 
sisted, and General Castellon upheld him. This was 
the beginning of the American Phalanx —La Falange 
Americaine as it came to be known in Nicaragua. 

It is worth while to know something of the kind of 
men who followed Walker on this wild adventure. 


The Filibuster 


171 


One of them was Joaquin Miller, later to have world¬ 
wide fame as the Poet of the Sierras. He has left his 
estimate of the leader’s character: “General Walker 
was the cleanest man in word and deed I ever knew. 
He never used tobacco in any form, never drank any¬ 
thing except water, and always ate most sparingly. He 
never jested, and I cannot recall that I ever saw him 
smile. . . . His dress, language, and bearing were 
those of a clergyman, when not in the firing line, and 
his whole time was spent in reading. ... On enter¬ 
ing a town he as a rule issued a proclamation making 
death the penalty alike for insulting a woman, for 
theft, or for entering a church save as a Christian 
should.” 

Another was Frederick Henningsen, an Englishman 
who had been a soldier of fortune in Spain, Hungary, 
and Bulgaria before Nicaragua, and who fought after¬ 
wards in the Confederate Army. He said of the men 
who fought with Walker that he would rather have 
had a thousand of them than five thousand of the Civil 
War troops, north or south. “I have often seen them 
march with a broken or compound fractured arm in 
splints, and using the other to fire the rifle or revolver. 
Those with a fractured thigh or wounds which ren¬ 
dered them incapable of removal shot themselves. 
Such men do not turn up in the average of everyday 
life, nor do I ever expect to see their like again. All 
military science failed on a suddenly given field before 
such assailants, who came at a run to close with their 
revolvers and who thought little of charging a battery 
pistol in hand.” 


172 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

Still another was the Massachusetts Yankee, Fred¬ 
erick Townsend Ward, who was soon to find fame 
and death in China and to have his memory worshiped 
by the Chinese to this day as that of a brave man who 
had served them well. 

All of Walker’s men were young as was the leader. 
They were a rough, undisciplined lot, some of them 
veterans of the Mexican war, then less than ten years 
past, gold diggers from the California camps, men of 
their hands all of them. Among their number were 
many who had fought in petty wars in many countries, 
following in their own way Sir Philip Sidney’s advice: 
“When you see a good war go to it.” One quality they 
had in common, marksmanship. They could all shoot. 
And this gave them no mean advantage against the 
Nicaraguan type of soldier who was effective only at 
short range, and believed that victory inclined toward 
the side that burned most powder and made most noise. 

These men were fighters by preference, and in the 
lulls of war they fought each other. Walker’s regula¬ 
tions against duelling were strict, but sometimes the 
antagonists managed to avoid them. The marksman¬ 
ship was not always as good as might have been ex¬ 
pected in such a force. On one occasion one of the 
seconds standing far to one side narrowly escaped 
being shot in the foot. On another two lieutenants 
were about to fight on the beach of Lake Nicaragua 
when an aide of Walker’s appeared. “Gentlemen, 
General Walker presents his compliments and directs 
me to say that the duel may continue, but that he wishes 


The Filibuster 173 

to inform you that the survivor will be shot.” There 
was no duel. 

As a result of a trifling quarrel, Col. Piper chal¬ 
lenged Col. Saunders. The latter, exercising the chal¬ 
lenged man’s right to a choice of weapons, selected 
rifles at five paces. This was a little too cold-blooded 
for the other colonel, and he resigned his commission 
and left the country. 

Usually, however, there was little time or energy to 
spare for duels. The fighting was continuous and 
bloody enough to satisfy the most exacting. The first 
expedition after the little force landed at Realejo was 
against Rivas (the local name for Nicaragua City), 
held by the Legitimists. A hundred and fifty native 
troops under Col. Ramirez accompanied the Americans 
on the Vesta which carried them to San Juan del Sur. 
From there it was a twenty-five mile march to Rivas. 
They must avoid the main roads for fear of discovery, 
and marched most of the way at night through jungle 
in rain and darkness. Forty hours were spent in 
marching the twenty-five miles. They attacked at 
noon, and Ramirez and his native troops ran at the 
first shot. The Americans bored their way into the 
town and fought from house to house. It was a four 
hours’ fight almost hand to hand. The Americans 
were penned in a big house on a cross street and cut 
their way out with sword and pistol, forty against 
hundreds. It was the kind of work and the kind of 
odds that they were to know many times more before 
their Nicaraguan days were over, and they took to it 
kindly from the start. 


174 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

The first campaign looked like a defeat, but Walker 
was only beginning. He made a new contract with 
Castellon, seized a supply of lead belonging to an Eng¬ 
lishman at Leon, and secured full authority to treat 
with the Accessory Transit Company which so far had 
refused to deal with the Democrats. He was also 
given authority to draw into his force such native 
troops as he wanted. Fresh American recruits were 
coming in steadily. The next time they took the field 
the Legitimists were the aggressors. Gen. Guardlola, 
the Guatemalan, attacked Walker and his men at La 
Virgen. The attackers outnumbered the others eleven 
hundred to seven hundred, but the result was utter 
rout for the Legitimists. Their loss was reported as 
being almost equal to Walker’s whole force, and 
Guardlola rode back to Rivas alone. 

Castellon died, and Corral succeeded Guardlola at 
Rivas. Walker moved to follow up his success at 
La Virgen. On the way he captured dispatches In¬ 
tended for Corral, read them, and sent them on with 
a message that they were harmless to him and might 
be useful to Corral. His next objective was Granada, 
on Lake Nicaragua, the oldest city In Nicaragua, and 
a stronghold of the Legitimists, defended by Gen. 
Corral In person. Walker attempted no frontal attack 
here. Instead he commandeered one of the lake 
steamers, loaded his entire force aboard, and landed 
near the city at night. At daybreak the Granadans 
found the Democrats already in possession. Guards 
were posted on all the streets. The city had been 
taken without the loss of a man In the attacking force. 


The Filibuster 


175 


This broke the back of the Legitimists’ military power 
for the time being. Corral escaped from the city and 
held out for a time, but he, too, soon surrendered and 
rode into Granada side by side with Walker. 

The little American was approaching the zenith of 
his career. The civil war was apparently at an end. 
He was commander-in-chief of the Nicaraguan army, 
with Corral, his late opponent, as Minister of War 
and Gen. Rivas as Provisional President. But it is 
hard for Central American politicians to run straight. 
Six days after Corral took office, letters from him to 
Guardiola were captured proving treachery. He was 
tried and in three days ended his life before a firing 
squad. 

Now appears the beginning of the controversy that 
was at last to compass the downfall of Walker. Under 
the contract of the Nicaraguan government with the 
Accessory Transit Company the government was a 
sharer in the profits, but there were no profits. Walker 
believed that the company was falsifying its reports 
and seized its property until the accounts should be 
straightened out. Since it was an American company, 
this act immediately brought him into conflict with the 
government at Washington and made him an interna¬ 
tional figure. Also it killed any chance he might have 
had of being recognized by the United States. 

An interlude in this tangle of international law was 
a brief war with Costa Rica. The Costa Ricans at¬ 
tacked the town of Rivas and there was bloody fighting 
in the streets. The outstanding characteristic of 
Central American wars is the fact that most of the 


176 Boys* Own Book of Adventurers 

battles are fought through the streets of towns. This 
gives it a hand-to-hand character which effectually 
upsets the popular idea that such revolutions are 
largely bloodless. 

At one time during this dog fight in the streets of 
Rivas, Walker’s men seized huge cheeses in the market 
and rolled them in front of them as shields. In the 
lulls of the fighting they ate their defenses. The fight¬ 
ing went on all day, around corners of buildings, from 
behind the pillars of the cathedral, through loopholes, 
from house to house, the fighters cutting their way 
through the walls. At one time thirteen Americans 
armed only with pistols charged a house and drove 
out two hundred Costa Ricans, killing thirty of them. 

At nightfall the Americans drew off and returned 
to Granada. The Costa Ricans had had enough, and 
when the cholera broke out in their ranks they gave up 
and went back to their own country. 

Now came another shift in the fortunes of the Grey- 
Eyed Man of Destiny. Already he was beginning to 
pay the penalty of too much success. The cry of 
foreign domination was raised and Rivas, who owed 
his presidency to Walker’s victories, deserted to the 
Legitimists at Chinandega which that party still held. 
His excuse was that the American was planning to 
establish a slave empire. There has been much discus¬ 
sion on this point. It is undoubted that Walker was 
friendly to slavery, but there is little or no evidence 
that he definitely intended it as a part of his imperial 
plans. He was an ambitious dreamer and he had pic¬ 
tured to himself a great Central American empire with 


The Filibuster 


111 


himself at the head of it. Whether or not slavery was 
to be a part of it is of little importance, since actual 
slavery would have differed little in effect from the 
virtual peonage under which most of the manual labor 
of the country was done. But it was enough to turn 
the scales against him in all northern states at home 
and to make him an unsafe man in the minds of the 
government at Washington. When he seized the prop¬ 
erty of the Accessory Transit Company, that company 
quit all attempts to operate and appealed to Wash¬ 
ington for aid in recovering their boats and wharves. 

With the passing of Rivas, Walker was elected 
president, oddly enough on the Legitimist ticket, the 
party that he had been fighting since his first arrival in 
Nicaragua. One of his earliest acts was to send Father 
Vigil to Washington as minister from the new govern¬ 
ment. Mr. Marcy, then Secretary of State, refused to 
receive him and thus gave Walker definitely to under¬ 
stand that he need expect nothing from his own 
country. 

Granada, his capital, was being hard pressed by the 
enemy, who had once more taken the field against him, 
and he determined to abandon the city and to make 
his headquarters at Rivas, where he had fought the 
Costa Ricans. Henningsen, the English soldier of 
fortune, carried out the evacuation and after days of 
desperate fighting cut his way through to the waiting 
lake steamers, burning the city behind him. Before he 
embarked he thrust a lance upright in the ground, bear¬ 
ing the inscription in Spanish, “Here was Granada.” 
From this date Walker’s fortunes declined. He. 


178 Boys^ Own Book of Adventurers 

still held the title of President of Nicaragua, but the 
Nicaraguans in his army were fast slipping over to the 
other side. He was shut up in Rivas with a small 
force and although American reinforcements arrived 
at San Juan del Norte the efforts to relieve him from 
that side were too slow and the forces of the enemy 
were strengthened in time to hold them off. The enemy 
now controlled Lake Nicaragua and the steamers on 
the lake, and the town was closely invested. Provi¬ 
sions were low and the defenders killed and ate the 
oxen and mules of the quartermaster’s forces and 
finally the horses of the Americans. In spite of this 
they stood off almost daily assaults for nearly three 
months. With the Nicaraguans united against him, 
the situation was impossible, and Walker surrendered 
to Captain Davis, of the U. S. sloop of war St. Marys, 
May 1, 1856. 

The greatest force of the Americans during the 
siege was 919, and that had been worn down to less 
than three hundred men fit for active duty at the end 
against a besieging force that ranged from four thou¬ 
sand to seven thousand. 

The curtain was going down, but Walker refused to 
recognize any end of the drama that left him out of 
the cast. Back in New York, he organized another 
expedition which attempted to land through Costa 
Rica but was turned back by a United States man-of- 
war on watch in the Caribbean. This time he was tried 
in New Orleans for violating the neutrality laws and 
acquitted. A second effort came to grief on a coral 


The Filibuster 179 

reef in the Caribbean, and the men were brought back 
to Mobile. 

A third time the leader tried, this time from New 
Orleans in two schooners with ninety-one men in all. 
One of the vessels was captured by the British and the 
men were put ashore in Honduras. Here they joined 
the men from the other schooner and Walker put it 
to vote to decide what should be done. There were 
two choices, to crowd into the single schooner and go 
back to America beaten or to cut through Honduras 
to Nicaragua. If they chose the latter they must cap¬ 
ture Trujillo, defended by batteries, which stood in 
their way. Without a dissenting voice they voted for 
Nicaragua. There was a revolution simmering in Hon¬ 
duras, and Walker saw a chance here to bring added 
strength to his side. Unfortunately the two chief items 
in the program of the Honduran leaders were loot and 
loafing, and Walker never found the revolutionists. 

Trujillo was protected by an old Spanish fort of 
solid masonry defended by rifles and cannon, but 
Walker and his men carried it in a frontal attack in 
the early morning. The chief ordnance officer in the 
American force was Ryan, afterwards commander of 
the Virginius in an attempt to aid the Cuban revolu¬ 
tionists against Spain. The Virginius was captured 
and Ryan was shot at Santiago with most of his men. 

With the capture of Trujillo the British appeared 
and the commander of H. M. S. Icarus notified Walker 
that the British government had a mortgage on the 
port revenues of the town and would permit no inter¬ 
ference by an American filibuster. There was still 


180 Boys* Own Book of ’^Adventurers 

time to turn back, as the Icarus offered to return the 
Americans to the United States. They decided instead 
to make a try to join forces with the Honduran rebels, 
and stole out of Trujillo at night with a native who 
had promised to guide them to the rebel camp. First 
the guide lost his way, and then they lost their guide. 
The next day they found the village where the rebels 
had been, but there were no rebels. Evidently the 
revolution was taking a day off. By this time, fighting 
had reduced the ninety-one men to thirty-one. The 
Icarus had followed them down the coast, playing hide 
and seek with them, and finally brought them to bay 
in the abandoned camp of Cabanas, the Honduran 
rebel. 

Walker had come to the end of the trail, and trust¬ 
ing in the British assurances of a safe conduct he sur¬ 
rendered to the commander of the Icarus. That 
worthy steamed back to Trujillo and turned him over 
to Alvary, commander of the Honduran government 
forces. There was a last loophole. He might have 
appealed to the American consul on the ground of his 
American citizenship, but he scorned to do it. “The 
president of Nicaragua is a citizen of Nicaragua,” he 
declared and went to his death on the Honduran beach 
in front of a firing squad of barefooted soldiers. Only 
twelve men out of the original ninety-one finally found 
their way back to the United States. 

Walker cannot be judged by the standards of our 
own time, near to us as he is in years. He belonged 
to an adventurous day when men dreamed wild dreams 
of gold, of power, of dominion. It was only a short 


The Filibuster 


181 


time before that all Spanish America had thrown off 
the yoke of Spain. China was in ferment and the 
Sepoy rebellion was shaking the power of the British 
in India. Our own war with Mexico had drawn atten¬ 
tion southward and released men’s minds from the 
bonds of convention and habit. It was a time when 
anything might happen. 

Neither can he be accused of carrying war to Nica¬ 
ragua. When he appeared war was an old story there, 
and had the Nicaraguans held to their side of the con¬ 
tract as he held to his they would probably have known 
a peace that had not been their lot for twenty years. 
Wherever he held the power there was order. He 
reduced his own brother to the ranks for a breach of 
military discipline. He court-martialed and shot men 
for looting or burning. 

He carried none of the air of the traditional fili¬ 
buster or guerrilla fighter as we find him In the pages 
of fiction. He was a little man, not over five feet five 
Inches In height and weighing about a hundred and 
thirty pounds. He wore no uniform or decorations, 
never carried sword or pistol except In battle, and 
never indulged In private quarrels. He had no close 
friends and made no confidences, but the wild youth 
that followed him had for him the deepest respect, 
mingled with a wholesome fear. Through all his life 
he held to a firm belief in his star of destiny which 
led him to the presidency of Nicaragua and then to the 
desolate Honduran beach In the early dawn. And he 
was only thirty-seven when he died. 




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